I'm glad we agree on the first point, and sorry if I misunderstood you on that.

As for shadow banning, yes it is employed here on occasion, but I'm speaking strictly from my own experience with the site. I regularly take large steaming shits on various capital interests in favor of the hacker ethos, and so far it has always been permitted (and is not hard to verify it isn't shadow banned). That this site is the child of SV monied interests says at least something positive about their tolerance for these things compared to other sites like X/reddit/bluesky who all have the groupthink/echo chamber concept polished quite well by now.