There are some very smart people on that site that only contribute there(although some are old slashdotters from back in the day) so it is a shame.
I get the impression by watching the community that interacting with them is basically impossible as a normal person.
Someone gets an invite, has productive technical discussions, eventually says something that doesn't align exactly with their religion(and we're talking really obscure stuff here) and he gets swiftly and permanently banned possibly bringing the person who invited him down with him as well.
It's easy to state this, almost as easy as to find a specific entry in the modlog proving it. If you want, I can do the grunt work if you cite a specific username.
It has already been mentioned that banned users' "ban-worthy" comments are censored.
I'd have to run an operation on lobste.rs in order to make a point and then maybe the non-representative examples I do capture are of people actually going crazy.
HN hides "dead" comments for unregistered users but at least registration is open.
This way I can know that some user was unknowingly making ill-informed claims about the extent of the contributions of the author of the linked project to certain products as opposed to any of the worst-case assumptions one could make from the replies.
> [censored]. Oh, you know who also [censored]? [censored]? Exactly!
I'm a member of the site since 2017, read almost every comment (it's not that much), and have a habit of saving "spicy" threads before mods arrive. So there's a pretty good chance I can recover more background than what's available now.
I get the impression by watching the community that interacting with them is basically impossible as a normal person.
Someone gets an invite, has productive technical discussions, eventually says something that doesn't align exactly with their religion(and we're talking really obscure stuff here) and he gets swiftly and permanently banned possibly bringing the person who invited him down with him as well.