The ultimate irony is that many conservatives will hesitate before commenting on this here, because people don't want to be on the receiving end of a torrent of downvotes.
Anyone who cares about downvotes is a shallow idiot. I can think of more serious consequences, but caring about getting greyed out on HN is not one of them.
My main account is my reputation on the internet. That means there literally would be "serious consequences" if I posted conservative opinions. So, yeah. I'm a shallow idiot for not wanting to get fired.
dang has chastised me in the past for discussing politics, so I won't. I'm not going to get downvoted, I'll get yelled at (at best) or shadowbanned or outright banned from the site. There is only one acceptable opinion of political discourse here and I will not oppose it (here, anyway). It is, after all, a very big internet out there, and we are all guests here, and I'd like to thank pg and dang and the rest of the gang for letting us visit and talk (about other things). This site is a very nice service for non-political discussions, thanks well earned to everyone "in charge".
I'll talk about emacs and vi instead of politics; what could possibly go wrong?
As a person who tries to uphold gentlemanly behavior, which boils down to trying to make people as comfortable as possible, imagine I found a vi echo chamber, perhaps a vi oriented IRC channel or web discussion board or vim editor marketing team mailing list where in excess of 99% of the people there were avid vi users.
It would be quite rude of me to discuss emacs in their little non-emacs echo chamber. Its simple politeness.
Its interesting that the original social network that being amateur radio had a variety of explicit and assumed codes along the lines of discussion will not involve political or religious topics. Also freemason lodges ban religious and political topics. Any technology that advances enough, eventually bans discussion of politics and religion or descends at absolute best into something like CB radio or graffiti or even worse, the cesspool that is twitter.
In America left wing politics is implicitly a religious belief and right wing politics is explicitly religious (generally Christian) so merely banning individually politics or religion isn't going to permit discussing the other. Also religious belief was arrived it by indoctrination and propaganda not reason or rational thought, therefore no change will occur via reason or rational thought or calm discourse. Presumably that's how the world was centuries ago, leading to the amateur radio code from the (19)10s and ancient freemasonry etc. Everything old is new again...