While I agree with you, I would hesitate to be throwing stones from the glass house that is Hacker News.

This place also suffers from some pretty severe systemic issues that are inherent to any site that delegates moderation responsibilities to ordinary users. Invariably, these tools get abused to silence people.

The amount of greyed out and dead posts in this very comments section is exhibit A, and it's a pattern I've seen repeated in pretty much all other sites like it.