> I'm neither a spammer nor a serial troll
Ok, but when you break the site guidelines (e.g. "Incredibly stupid and misleading comment of yours, slily insinuating" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49670568), and use HN primarily for political/ideological battle—which the guidelines ask commenters not to do [1], and which is a line at which we start banning [2]—it ends up amounting to the same thing.
Having skimmed your comments, I have mixed feelings about how the system [3] functioned here. On the one hand, you have been breaking the site guidelines and not using HN as intended. From that point of view, the software wasn't wrong.
On the other hand, your account was arguing for contrarian positions which caused it to get penalized by the community (which by definition disagrees with those), and eventually by the software, more than it would have if you did not have a minority view.
From an HN point of view, this is a thorny patch. We want to hold space for minority views and have no taste for the smugness of majorities, nor the brutal way they behave when contradicted. We know that creative ideas tend to come from uncommon sources, and since such things are what HN exists for, it would be foolish to cut those short. We want the long tails of most distributions to extend longer here than they get to do amid the large-group dynamics of most places online.
But was also need HN discussions to remain intellectually curious and not degenerate into flamewars. The trouble is that users with minority views are often the ones setting fires and stoking flames. They come into a discussion already feeling embattled and surrounded, and start out swinging. This pre-emptive hostility obviously has a defensive function. It is understandable when people have a background of seeing their views being silenced or treated unfairly. But it guarantees an aggressive response from the majority.
When that response inevitably comes, the minority account often then retreats into righteous indignation about being censored, banned, or squashed. But would they have been squashed if they had expressed themselves more neutrally and with more relational capacity? It's hard to say; they rarely try.
We want HN to be a space where minority views have a fair chance, but we can't have people breaking the site guidelines with flamewar, battle rhetoric, and so on, regardless of their views. We do try to cut them more slack than if they were coming from a dominant position—that's why I'm replying to you at such length—but not so much that we'd end up with two sets of rules.
In the end, we often have to ban such accounts despite knowing how difficult it is to take a minority position and in that respect sympathizing with the account holders—not because we agree-or-disagree with their views but because they're so clearly breaking the rules.
I've posted about this many times [4], usually in a context where I see this dynamic showing up and want to try to help by explaining it. What a minority view-holder needs to do differently, if they want a different outcome, is to remain neutral, resist the temptation to lash out, and field the majority responses (which are often rather shallow and predictable) with some understanding of where people are coming from, and how difficult (and even frightening) it might be to give even an inch on the topic.
What this means is that there is a greater burden on people holding a minority position [5]. It may be unfair, but it's intrinsic to how majorities and minorities interact.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
[3] By "the system" I mean the entire system of Hacker News: community, software, and moderators.
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...