Fair enough, but there is an asymmetric component at work here that I think bears identifying: you can have a community of tens of thousands of individuals that are moving in a mutually beneficial way and you can destroy that same community by having a few hundred dedicated people that will shout down every attempt at a reasonable discussion with misinformation and downright junk.

Destruction is simply much easier than construction. The dutch have a proverb about this (they have proverbs on just about anything, so that shouldn't come as a surprise): "Een gek kan meer vragen dan tien wijzen kunnen beantwoorden" -> "One crazy person can ask more questions than ten wise people can answer".

And that gives HN at times a weird imbalance where it might seem to a casual observer that we are on average a bunch of racists, in denial about COVID, that we aim to spread quackery and that letting this junk unanswered is tantamount to agreeing with it. I know that isn't the case, but you could not fault an outside observer for having that view because we put that on display almost every day.

This asymmetry is also present in real life, for instance in the form of vandalism, where destroying something takes a lot less effort than it does to repair it. And PG addressed some of this in his 'no broken windows' article (which I still think is one of his best pieces and exhibits a lot of deep insight).

So there is a difference between 'room for debate and the ability for people to say wrong things' and 'people saying wrong things because it either amuses them or because they aren't trying to debate anything at all, they are just trying to spread their payload to as many eyeballs as possible'.