I learned my post was on Hacker News and I added an ugly box telling them to fuck off. It's not the first time I've made a post that ended up on that site, and every time has been a harrowing experience with getting unwanted attention from alt-right tech bros.
I once thought HN was okay as long as you didn't look too hard at the light-gray-on-gray text in the comments. Then I saw more and more threads attacking women, and then a thread that veered into Replacement Theory. Someone posted a paraphrase of the 14 words of white supremacy with a smiley, and got a lot of upvotes.
HN's moderation policy is, as far as I knew when I last saw it, one guy saying "if you see a problem, e-mail me and I'll take care of it". So I e-mailed him about the 14 words post. He said he was sorry I felt that way, but he didn't want to run the kind of site that would restrict speech like that.
So I stopped going to the site. I feel bad that it took until then to get me to leave a site that explicitly cheers for venture capitalism, but I definitely couldn't go to a site that cheers for white supremacist sloganeering. The comments were not just dismissive and shitty, they were a Nazi bar.
(The feature where posts fade away as they get flagged by users is not moderation.)
