I saw all of the dead comments, and my first thought was that the mods had probably done a good job of cleaning up the vitriol. I was curious though, so I enabled showdead, and while I'm not sure that I agree with many of the dead comments, most of them are not noise. It's clear that there has been some emotional voting going on.

I find this very unfortunate to be honest. Instead of allowing dissent, the people here are actively deleting speech that they disagree with. Imagine if a conservative professor at Stanford silenced supporters of Edward Snowden.

I feel the same. I don't think I want to post here anymore. I mean, I should have known that it's not worth discussing politics on HN, but there's something really demoralizing about putting sincere and civil comments together just to have them deleted, all because a few people took their disagreement personally.

When I'm trying to keep it civil here and upvoting people I don't agree with when they make good points, and I get silenced in return, all it does is polarize me further. gg folks, have fun thinking I'm evil/brainwashed/sexist in your echo chamber.

There's a really good reason for it and it's up to you to figure that part out.

There is no reason to delete a post that presents a rational argument without use of insults or ad hominem attacks, regardless of if you think the viewpoint is "destroying [insert any topical political or current events issue here]".

There's plenty of reason to downvote trolls.

I did not see the posts that were deleted, but so far nothing I've seen in this thread seems like trolling.