In the context of Hacker News, disagreement is welcomed (in a way even encouraged) as long as it is constructional and argumentative.

Again, depends on what the community accepts and wants. I agree politically sensitive topics are turmoil, but it doesn’t take much for a community to be accepting of different views.

If the goal is to feed intellectual curiosity, another way of seeing things is always welcomed as long as it is written well

This is why I think downvoting submissions/comments is needed. I like how Hacker News forum does it. You need to have a certain number of upvotes on your contributions to even be able to downvote, and if the comment or a reply receives a lot of downvotes it gets greyed out or collapsed.

But again, ability to downvote is not enough, users needs to be aligned on what they want their community to look like. In case of HN, a very devoted and unique community, theres no patience for low effort, agresive and funny without a cause submissions. Their Guidelines itself is a really wonderful read.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Absolutely, but if the values are spread across the whole community, the village can self-govern itself and enforce the rules without force. If the majority of the villagers don’t tolerate something makes the job of a police much easier.

What’s even cooler here is I feel we have the opportunity to have neighboring villages: I’m a villager in my instance, you’re a villager in your instance, and civility and understanding is promoted because we are in a real sense representatives of our respective villages. We don’t want to make our villages look bad.

Such a nice point! You gave me something to think about now :) In a way, while you are still anonymous, the instance gives you an outside identity. You don’t have to remember the username to “know someone from the village” in a way the author describes it, the instance kinda already gives you this.