Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two site guidelines that apply to this. First, it's not ok to use HN primarily for political, ideological, or national battle. If a commenter is posting as you describe, we ask them to stop. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20727426 . But by no means does it follow that a commenter behaving that way must be a sockpuppet, astroturfer, shill, spy, foreign agent, etc. That's where the second guide…
> Should we ban accounts, or allow them to be persecuted, for "pro-X" views where X is outside, say, a standard deviation of what most people here take for granted? When those views are formed under the pressure and oppression of an increasingly influential authoritarian regime? Yes, you should. Otherwise there won't be much of a community left to protect. There is little reason to believe you can have it both ways a…
The answer is that we don't moderate HN that way because we want it to be a pluralistic site. What I hear you saying is that a pluralistic site is impossible ("there won't be much of a community left to protect"). I don't think that's correct. I think HN, for all its problems, is such a site, at least for the time being. I also think that HN's pluralism is mostly what people dislike about it, even though no one ever puts it that way—not because they're dishonest, but because that's not how it feels.
In practice, a large pluralistic internet forum feels like you are being invaded and besieged by hostile forces. (By "you" I mean all of us). Whatever segment of the spectrum here is most awful, most offensive to your values and experiences, that segment makes so strong an impression that it swells up in importance beyond everything else put together and becomes the image of the entire forum in your imagination. But if you think about it, that is just what one would expect from a genuine pluralism, where the spectrum is much wider than one is used to in daily life and on the siloed, sharded internet.
That is the next hurdle, I think, that we need to overcome as a community. We need to grow in awareness that the presence of opposing views is mostly a function of the size and diversity of the forum, i.e. that there are many people here whose lived experience is very different from our own, who also have a need to speak and be heard. We need to grow in ability to hear their experience also—their story also—without snapping shut. By the way, that is also the answer to the objection people sometimes make, that we must be saying that all opinions and expressions are equally valid. That's not so. Not all expressions are valid, but as far as I can tell, all experiences are. The solution is for people to share more of their lived experience and not dress it up so much in secondary opinions and expressions, especially ones that demean or deny the experience of others.
That's how the container here needs to develop. I hope that if it gets stronger in that way, HN will be able to remain pluralistic even if there are external attempts to manipulate it. The healthy way to defeat those pathogens is via a stronger immune system. If the community can't do that, it will end up killing itself, by breeding its own pathogens—chief among which is users accusing fellow community members of being astroturfers, spies, or foreign invaders, not because they have any evidence for saying so, but because what those community members have to say is outside their window of tolerance, so they are unable to meet it calmly and must reach for an explanation of disingenuousness instead.