'tptacek cited users writing extensive comments in good faith against comments that are in bad faith as a problem. Which it is! If you're familiar with Paul Graham's work, he goes into this quite extensively:

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

There are two senses of the word "troll." In the original sense it meant someone, usually an outsider, who deliberately stirred up fights in a forum by saying controversial things. [1] For example, someone who didn't use a certain programming language might go to a forum for users of that language and make disparaging remarks about it, then sit back and watch as people rose to the bait. This sort of trolling was in the nature of a practical joke, like letting a bat loose in a room full of people.

The definition then spread to people who behaved like assholes in forums, whether intentionally or not. Now when people talk about trolls they usually mean this broader sense of the word. Though in a sense this is historically inaccurate, it is in other ways more accurate, because when someone is being an asshole it's usually uncertain even in their own mind how much is deliberate. That is arguably one of the defining qualities of an asshole.

Given that the people on news.YC have historically/are generally acting in good faith, it only takes a handful of people acting in bad faith to generate large amounts of comments from users who aren't, and that takes effort from them that would likely be better served elsewhere, just to maintain the quality of discussion on the site. Refuting people acting in bad faith isn't enjoyable, and likely hurts the reticence rate of the site in the long term for users acting in good faith, who are exactly who you want to keep.

After all, Graham himself notes that DH6. refutations are the most desirable, and a person can only reasonably write so many of those a day. Wasting multiple ones on those acting in bad faith hurts the quality of the site for everyone, including the people acting in bad faith.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

This article was, taken most generously, DH4, with a strong case for being DH3. Frequently, Quillette articles are nothing past DH2.[1] Refuting it and some of the bad faith comments in this thread, we see multiple DH5s and DH6s (of course, there are also some DH3s and DH4s and what looks to be a couple of DH1s). Noticeably, there are few comments on the side of the author that are multiple lines long, including in response to multiple DH6s. 'kragen's comments are the only DH5s and DH6s I see on the author's side in this thread, and they're hardly on topic.

Even users like 'sneak, who aren't particularly left or liberal, chimed in to note how unreasonable the author seemed to be, not on the ground of morality or "ideological grounds," as you put it, but practicality: it's not a matter of what you can't say, it's a matter of the quality of disagreement it's at, and the quality of disagreement it generates. Even if the point is entirely valid, if it's presented with a sufficient agitation-to-substance ratio, it's probably not right for news.YC.

To quote our venerable moderator, "Not only were many high-quality stories being overlooked, probably most of the finest submissions—the out-of-the-way, intellectually interesting, totally unexpected submissions that make for the best of HN—were getting ignored." Given that there's so much high-quality, intellectually-stimulating information on the WWW, and that there are hundreds of high-quality submissions to news.YC a day that are buried, it barely makes sense to keep as light a touch on downweighting that news.YC does, and it doesn't make sense at all when an article won't make for good discussion.

In fact, Paul Graham also notes that this exact type of thread is cancerous to the quality of discussion, and should only really be left alone when of particular value to hackers. Notice, here, that 'tptacek is consistent with his position in this thread, and once more, it's absolutely about how much it lowers the quality of discussion and brings undesirable users:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157895

Quillette is arguably at the zenith of producing this type of article: the marketing technique is masterful and impressive, but it's not fit for HN, and doesn't generate good discussion.

He went on about this often before he left the site almost entirely, so you don't have to take that as a one-off admission, either:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The correct place for Quillette articles is probably twitter, which is where Paul Graham shares them now in lieu of here:

https://duckduckgo.com/site:twitter.com/paulg%20quillette