(This is for anything with a political slant to it, I still find it useful for niche subjects, say mycology)
I’ve also seen a ton of cases where people expressed disagreement or contrarian positions but did so in a respectful and fact-aware manner and had positive interactions because they were respectful of the community.
Positive interactions are certainly possible and do happen, but the site is heavily heavily tilted towards groupthink. Fighting it is an uphill battle.
This experience as well as a rather low discussion level on Reddit made me resign from using it. Hard to find a replacement, however; I like to use Stack Exchange, as a very dry form of communication that focuses on merit.
Nobody (or close) likes out-of-group think.
Users rarely deviate from the established upvote/downvote patterns. In fact, I'd go as far as saying many users don't even read the comments before voting.
When two users are having a heated argument, it's common for a third person to respond to the 'right' person with an innocuous comment and be heavily downvoted for it.
It's exhausting to wade through all of those.
It didn't used to be. It used to be pretty good, but a handful of censorious mods insisted that they needed tools to fight exactly the same sorts of things that OP is insisting that moderation is for - illegal content, real harassment - and then immediately started using those tools to purge political enemies.
Note also how I mentioned people repeating low-effort arguments. The tedium comes from the stream of people who come, repeat someone else’s idea, aren’t prepared or willing to engage intellectually, and whine about censorship when nobody finds that compelling. Anyone who spends much time in a particular forum can recognize that and see that there’ll be very little value from engaging. We see that a lot here where people complain that HN is biased against cryptocurrency because the response to “have you accepted our lord and savior bitcoin into your heart?” was not well received by people who remember the exact same claims being made a decade ago.
It wasn't supposed to be that way. Even the Reddiquette page told people not to downvote simply because they disagree. But nobody reads Reddiquette, and these days most redditors think disagreement is the purpose of downvotes.
That being said, you'd have to be naive to think downvoting for disagreement doesn't happen on HN.
> post throttling
This is only a thing for new accounts as an anti-spam measure.
> over zealous moderators banning people for wrongthink
I think it's wrong to blame reddit for this. This will be a problem on ANY site that allows users to create their own communities within it.
This is 99% of Reddit though.