This community is not equipped to have this discussion, as evidenced by the discussion.

Seeing HN used to promote garbage is going to cause good people to leave, and that in turn is going to accelerate the degree to which garbage will end up on the homepage and so on. This is a downward spiral.

This is not the way to handle this. There are better ways to handle this.

You seem to be on a tear today. FYI, I added my flag here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27577500

As well as adding a flag to one of the comments in that discussion that attacked you. I don't leave a lot of flags on HN. For various reasons, I'm pretty conservative in my use of flags.

I'm surprised to see this particular piece where I am currently commenting got so many upvotes and so many comments. I asked about the mechanism of how this drug works and got some meaningful engagement and also some really worthless engagement, in my opinion.* And then I lost interest. I couldn't readily see a meaningful connection.

But you are basically talking about censorship. Censorship grows interest in the forbidden topic. I wholly disagree with your position here.

If this is the garbage you claim it is -- and it may well be, I just don't know the topic well enough to affirmatively agree with you -- then there are vastly better ways to kill it without harming freedom of speech.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562715