Often there is too much censoring going on but at least they appear to be a bit more transparent about it now. The one feature that I would like to see is to be able to collapse all comments by default (and read only top level comments).
And often, comments critical of HN like this one first get many upvotes and then get sent back to a neutral 1... which is what just happened
That doesn't sound like us, though of course it's always possible that we made a mistake. I've made hundreds of thousands of moderation decisions and tens of thousands of posts. No doubt thousands of those, at least, were wrong.
If you're going to make a claim like this, you should provide a link so that readers can make up their own minds. When such complaints show up linklessly, it's usually because there's more to the story that the complaint is omitting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
It's rare for people to actually supply a link in response to such a reply, so kudos to you!
The description ("The nickname was nothing bad, you just didn't like it") was false though. 'lovetrump' was a trollish username, and we don't allow those on HN because they effectively troll every thread they post to, which is bad.
To be specific: to your knowledge dan has never allowed any troll bait political nicks of any kind.
Additionally: you have a feeling he might allow democratic troll nicks. the strength of that feeling ranges from not surprised if to hard to believe not depending on the day.
Your evidence: claim that the forum is very democratic
I don't believe you would choose a username like that (and to a lesser extent, your current one) for any other purpose than to explicitly provoke heated arguments. There are plenty of places on the web where you can go for those, I am happy that dang et al are making an effort to minimize them.
And often, comments critical of HN like this one first get many upvotes and then get sent back to a neutral 1... which is what just happened