[da_maire]

HN may be user-driven, but it's heavily moderated, privately run and those operating it have a long established policy of banning and deleting content (or sometimes entire sources, e.g all of Gawker Media) at will for any reason they see fit. Same applies to discussion and the 'ghosting' of specific users with poor reputations. There's no guidelines for what's 'allowed' and 'disallowed' (at least none they've committed to) so bans are completely arbitrary and usually carried out with no official explanation or notification. This is actually standard operating procedure for any moderated discussion board and HN's particularly aggressive stance has contributed to it's success - higher quality content, higher quality discussion. Slashdot operated under similar rules and enjoyed success for at least a full decade despite the same complaints of 'censorship' coming up constantly. Slashdot eventually fell apart for unrelated reasons (shrinking/aging audience, failed attempts at modernization) but it's still a proven model with plenty of precedence. If you're concerned that you're being intentionally kept from reading about something, get your technology-related news from multiple sources. There's plenty of sites with looser guidelines to choose from.

One thing that annoys me about HN though is that I read it primarily through Feedly, and content often gets pushed to HN's feed prior to deletion, so I end up with a lot of annoying dead links to HN in Feedly.