I would very much fear for the economic consequences of voicing various opinions. Even if they didn't lead to my termination at work, I'm certain they would prevent any kind of career advancement.
I'm reasonably sure I can survive in the world without my opinions being known, or the changes I presumably would like to see not being made. In short, they win, I'll survive somehow, and my kids will eat. They'll also maybe learn that some things I might believe are not acceptable, and will have to think about that when choosing to believe them themselves.
Certain ideas and people have definitively won the day, and it's now just survival mode for many.
These free speech rights we technically have were not acquired without cost--on the contrary, they came at enormous cost in blood. Now we refrain from defending them because doing so might inconvenience us.
Of course, it's easy for me to say this, sitting in front of a computer writing vague comments. Food for thought, especially for Americans the day after Independence Day.
i'm still bothered by the active censorship of comments and discussion that occurred earlier in the week, and i hope this discussion is informative for the moderators, who are hopefully having discussions about how best to handle similar situations in the future.
Mods are not trying to optimize HN for opinion but for intellectual curiosity, and that requires substantive discussion. That's pretty much the whole story, though of course there are a thousand details.
This thread is different from the other ones because the OP is different. Mods are doing the same thing here as in any other. That's devilishly hard for people to see because everyone interprets moderation through the filter of their own pre-existing opinions and there's little we can do about it. I wrote about this here if anyone wants more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14693348.
I empathize with those who've also turned to self-censorship for fear of being branded as part of a the problem. I want to have the tough conversations, but not at the expense of being made a public example for holding opinions that are neither hateful nor malicious, just colored by my origins and journey through life: the exact same factors that others advocate taking into account.
The whole thing is really unfortunate: people holding moderate (and in many ways, mainstream) opinions are withdrawing from the public discourse, which I don't believe is conducive to satisfactory progress.