I have since lost faith.
HN likes to masquerade as some sort of upscale establishment, high and above the petty squabbles of Eslewhere, but in the end this place too devolves into a predictable echo chamber just like the rest of them, when it comes to any topic on which people have varied opinions.
This is not a place for dissenting views (such as this comment). This community does not brook any disagreement, because this service is not designed for it.
This did not happen overnight; for more than a year I have been watching perfectly fine comments getting buried in the gray for not siding with the prevailing mob on divisive topics. Even neutral, soft-spoken stances get struck down.
One can now reliably predict what the majority of comments are going to be like, just by reading the title of a post.
I've brought this up several times with dang, but apparently you're not able to appreciate these problems until you try participating as a regular user.
And let's not even mention the awful UI design with its vendetta against eyes, low light and small screens.
HN is broken, and one of the major indicators of a broken service is a tone-deaf management who continues to insist that everything is Working As Intended.
This isn't a place where dissenting opinions get upvotes. Why should they? I think a fair of posters with plenty of karma are still willing to post things that get massively downvoted and cause a reaction. I'm getting better at it. I keep a mental model of how I've reacted to HN, look at the page - "there's the reaction, down five or ten points", "hmm, I'm guess down and up votes balanced", "ah, that was a crowd pleaser".
I don't think hn is more broken than America or the Internet or whatever.
But HN wants to be different, with its quirky rules like not being allowed to downvote posts and replies, or needing a certain amount of karma to be able to downvote comments, and the time limits on edits etc., instead of just following the basic Reddit model.
So clearly someone at HN thought that a simple free-for-all system wasn't good enough, prone to abuse, and decided to make some changes, but HN isn't good enough either; it's still too easy for 3-4 downvoters to prevent thousands of people from seeing a comment they don't want to be seen.
It's too easy to suppress a side or view with fewer supporters here.
One thing HN should have borrowed is how some subreddits don't show a post/comment's score until N hours have passed.
If votes don't affect a comment's visibility for a while then everybody may have a chance to be heard. For more severe violations like spam or harassment, there's always the Flag button.