Is the point of this article supposed to be "Humans grow, so leave the vile stuff I said when I hadn't grown as much around for more and more people can see that I said it?"
IMHO the fact that the biggest font in this article is used to reprint the reprehensible statement is a clue that this author is actually resisting growth by implying what he said isn't actually that bad, and twitter should keep showing it to more strangers. Real growth would look like deleting the tweet yourself and looking for traces of it in your current language!
This was my first reaction too, but then I thought back to when I was first learning SQL and, after hours of work trying to tabulate events from users across multiple tables, discovered that I seemed to be double-counting (or more) in mysterious ways. I was using Venn diagrams to understand how joins worked and I think the "intersection" depiction of inner joins _did_ cause me to think that "duplicates would be handled," whatever that would even mean. Really it just caused me to skip over the complexity of thinking about it.
If you think of inner joins as a cross join with a filter, then we have all seen cross joins represented by Venn diagrams - and for me at least I lost several hours of work restructuring my understanding of what I was working with!
This is the time for making ourselves uncomfortable and leaving room for others to speak.
It's dangerous to avoid short-term pain by stifling conflict. HN is about technology news and I don't think we should separate the "oh cool" part from the "how will this affect our neighbors" part.
I spend my life first and foremost in a community. I think it makes perfect sense to look for a good community first and then check in on their project.
That said, I've noticed that all of my favorite communities are centered around good work, and that good work makes it easy to find and share joy. A great community isn't going to be working on something stupid.
IMHO the fact that the biggest font in this article is used to reprint the reprehensible statement is a clue that this author is actually resisting growth by implying what he said isn't actually that bad, and twitter should keep showing it to more strangers. Real growth would look like deleting the tweet yourself and looking for traces of it in your current language!