[MaxfordAndSons]

> To get favorable treatment here you need to be beautiful or wealthy.

Or just well spoken and reasonable? Sure well known celebs of the tech industry do perhaps get the "favorable treatment" of extra upvotes. But people aren't participating in these discussions just to get "favorable treatment", they're doing it for the intellectually engaging environment, the quality of which is a result of trading off some amount of unmitigated free speech

And it's not like dissenting opinions get flagged or even downvoted to oblivion - the grandparent isn't gray, for example. Only noise, hate speech and misinformation gets that treatment. In fact I'd argue that grandparent maybe should be, since he's citing a universal hatred of women as a positive value in a community - so I think it's still a lot closer to Usenet than you claim.