Looks like this headline has been removed from the front page, despite being only 2 hours old and having a lot of votes. It's marked as "DEAD" on hckernews, whatever that means: https://archive.is/8RxuV
I can only imagine reddit investors (PG?) do not appreciate the heavy defense of free speech making its way into HN forums
When a post is killed or dropped off the front page it is normally as a result of user flagging. I'm not a mod so I don't know, but I suspect that's what happened here. Many users flagged the article; it drops rank.
If anything HN works to avoid censoring these topics: mods often unban / unkill these types of articles. (Again, a search of dang's comments will probably find examples.)
HN, after all, should be about building stuff, not the outrage du jour.
Debating whether free speech should be upheld, and to what degree, on the biggest online forum that exists, is a pretty interesting topic to me and many others who upvoted the article. And I do think building a successful social network ought to be of interest to HN. While the topic may not satisfy everyone, it's a single extra headline on a page with 20 others and is easily ignored. Right now there is NOTHING about reddit on the front of HN, which is pretty odd given its origin as a YC project and the number of people interested in recent news about reddit.
This is exactly why I don't participate on HN often. If the mods want everyone to hold the same opinion, great, but don't expect much real growth or interesting discussion from that policy. Shutting down debate is childish
Regardless of how this topic was removed, I think it was an interesting discussion that was silenced prematurely, and that's too bad.