I am not sure what opinion you thought I was trying to express. Evidently some sort of anti-censorship argument? To the contrary, my comment was explaining that the issue of US immigration has become highly polarized, and discussing highly polarized issues on HN is generally destructive, so probably we shouldn't attempt to discuss the issue here. This is closer to being a pro-censorship argument than an anti-censorship argument. (Later I added an illustration of how well a discussion can go without polarization, and how radically that differs from the current comment thread, but you may not have seen that.)

Your comment begins by signaling partial disagreement ("Sure, but") but then makes no argument tending to show that the issue is not highly polarized or that HN is a good place to discuss highly polarized issues. Instead, it discusses other topics relating to social group dynamics, but not in a way that is relevant to the comment you were replying to.

You're advocating for avoiding polarised discussions because they degenerate quickly. I'm only pointing out that that's not the only option: you could allow these discussions while ruthlessly silencing bad faith actors (for whatever definition of "bad faith" you want to adopt). Those are both "pro-censorship" stances (although I prefer the word "moderation" to "censorship"), but they're going about it in different ways.

That's what I mean by the Nazi bar problem[0]: you can't solve it by just not allowing certain topics to be discussed, because eventually in some completely tangential situation, a nasty flamewar is going to erupt and people who are not Nazis will be appalled that there are Nazis here.

[0]: I'm explicitly not saying that certain opinions expressed on HN are literal Nazi opinions, the Nazi bar problem is just a convenient analogy for the situation when one group of people holds opinions that are utterly appalling to many other people that frequent the same space.

I see. Thank you for clarifying. I indeed had not understood you.

It sounds like you think the problem is the wrong sort of people. But almost everybody retreats into ego defense and partisan struggle under sufficiently threatening circumstances, even though some people are habitually more prone to that kind of thing than others. It's more about minimizing the frequency of the wrong sort of circumstances.

Additionally, though I think everyone is happy that I'm not the one running the site, I have observed elsewhere that your favored "ruthless silencing" approach has some side effects you may not be anticipating.

Just to be clear, I'm not advocating for anything specific because I understand that the problem is hard. But I feel like some people want to have their cake and eat it too. If you don't silence certain types of discourse, you alienate certain participants (and HN understands this to a degree - you can't use racial slurs here, for example). Maybe that's acceptable - but you just have to be honest about it.