That's true. But that's mostly about different userbases. HN is actually not all that censored. It's largely community moderated. Very little gets completely deleted, just downvoted and flagged to oblivion.

Disruptive users do get shadow-banned, but it's trivial to create new ones. With accumulating karma, there is some pressure to self-censor. But overall, I like it better than StackExchange or reddit, for example.

Edit: I just noticed that this submission about Bitcoin energy use has been raised from the dead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16498776

The important distinction is censorship of citizen-vs-citizen aggression, and censorship of political dissent. (If Hacker News unconditionally deleted all criticism of YC companies, I'd visit 4chan instead.)

And that implies we can't solve the issue with technology alone. Moderation needs to be possible, but we have to figure out a way to prevent abuse.