Users on HN often did not simply fall in line behind the stereotypical camps that feed on this kind of issue
Oh god, they do. There are certainly dissenting voices but Hacker News has proven itself time and time again to be unable to examine the issue of gender, or more tellingly, unwilling to. These posts disappearing is not a one-off, there have been numerous instances of people flagging 'difficult' posts on HN, so that we can all continue arguing about semi-colons.
I must confess my knowledge into things that got unfairly flagged away is pretty limited, so you may well be correct. But as I said, the point is not that bad things happen here as well. It's that this is the only place where I actually found worthwhile opinions, whether they may be surrounded by bad ones or not. Maybe the signal-to-noise ratio is still too low, and we need to fix that, but at least it's not quickly approaching zero as is the case on, say, Twitter.
Oh god, they do. There are certainly dissenting voices but Hacker News has proven itself time and time again to be unable to examine the issue of gender, or more tellingly, unwilling to. These posts disappearing is not a one-off, there have been numerous instances of people flagging 'difficult' posts on HN, so that we can all continue arguing about semi-colons.