I hear this from time to time but it's hard to know how to assess it. Sometimes it comes from people with strong ideological commitments; in that case the word "toxic" sometimes carries an ideological charge, and in that case it becomes difficult to disentangle how they personally feel on the site from how they feel it ought to be moderated ideologically. Those are different questions, but it's not always possible to discuss them as different questions. It gets complicated quickly—which doesn't mean we don't care. I don't want people to feel badly about HN.

There's another aspect too. In some tech subcultures it became fashionable to diss HN. For a while it was a sport on Twitter to pass around links to something awful someone ran across on HN and use words like "cesspool" and all that. People would unify around how much they abhorred it. This used to bother me, because typically the something-awful would actually have been moderated or flagged or banned here quite quickly, but people would pass around screenshots anyway and talk about it as if that was HN. It isn't a good-faith discussion; the conclusion is predetermined, no one corrects false statements even when they find out the truth, and so on.

Eventually this started bothering me less because it is simply the way subcultures work—when a larger entity becomes perceived as mainstream, subcultures differentiate themselves in opposition to it, and people bond around abhorring the opposed object. It's no different in music, say. That variety of criticism can't be satisfied because the abhorrence itself serves a valuable function, and it would be a category error to try.

I'm not saying that these are the only two dynamics—on the contrary!—but they are factors that make this sort of criticism difficult to assess. Actually, the point you're making shows up often enough that it seems even to be a bit of a trope in certain circles. From that place it's not so easy to communicate further. The only thing I know that has much chance of working is a specific connection with a specific person around their specific experience. We're open to that and do it all the time.

p.s. Re "your link is not an adequate response to this issue" - sure, that link was just responding to what the GP (indirectly) said about Stallman threads on HN. One reason I replied on that narrow point is that there have been many mistaken claims about it. But there's another reason too: it's orders of magnitude easier to respond to narrow points than general ones. I spent over an hour writing this comment, and still I have to be paranoid about whether and how it may be open to misunderstanding. It's nearly impossible to have this sort of exchange in public—there just aren't the hours, and there's so much more downside than upside. Yet it's important to try anyway, sometimes, because otherwise we seem aloof and uncaring, which is also a dead end.