I don't want to ban you! I'd rather try to persuade you to make your points without sharp elbows. Others also do bad things (for example, I can see how https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772044 was a provocation) - but that it doesn't make it ok to escalate; we just get a downward spiral that way. Rather, we each need to spend the energy and time needed not to escalate. That creates capacity to then respond neutrally with good points. This strengthens the commons rather than damaging it—and as a bonus, your comments become more persuasive.

"Free speech" means different things to different people and depending on what one wants, there are different tradeoffs. On HN, we're trying to optimize for interesting speech, i.e. curious conversation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... That means we have to moderate people away from being nasty to each other. I don't think that's "intolerance of free speech", because HN's guidelines leave lots of room for arguing most views.

pg had a much lower threshold for banning people than we do, FWIW.

If you're not persuaded, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24620683 is an explanation I wrote recently which makes the same points I'm trying to make here and gives more examples. It also links to other comments on the same. The point is that smart people often come here with a combative model of how to do intellectual discussion that actually works well in smaller, more cohesive communities. The reason we don't allow it here is not because we think it's bad in itself, but because it doesn't translate well into HN's context—here it's just a recipe for tedious flamewar.