I agree that that's an issue. I've spent many hours talking with such users (generally by email) but of course most of them don't contact us.

The goal here is to have a healthy community that's organized around intellectual curiosity. Every time we lose one intellectually curious user, to me that is a disaster that cuts into the core of the site. To the extent that people aren't here because they feel unrepresented in the community, that's a big deal. We need their curiosity as much as anyone's, and diversity—if I may use that word literally—is a must-have for intellectual curiosity to function at all. Curiosity thrives on diffs.

And of course there is a vicious circle: if they leave, then they are even less represented here. I'm open to ideas about improving this. The problem is not that it is overlooked (by us, at least). It's that the same forces that make it hard to solve in society at large make it hard to solve here, and in one respect even harder, because people misinterpret the nature of this community in the way I described above.

This discussion can be tricky because it overlaps with the ideological question, which is not the same thing. Sometimes people want us to ban everyone who expresses the opposing ideology, because that's the only sort of community they feel welcome or safe in. Even if we wanted to do that, it wouldn't work. That does not mean we don't care about inclusion. We care a lot about inclusion. In fact I spend the majority of my waking hours trying to nurture the conditions for it here.

By the way: if any of your friends would be open to it, please send them to hn@ycombinator.com. I would very much appreciate hearing their concerns.