If the article lead an respected LW member to leave it's harmful to LW.

Granting concessions to anybody who threatens to leave the table is a harmful strategy.

It's a quite simple argument.

The world is complex. Simple arguments are generally wrong.

If you can't see that harm it might be you who's mindkilled.

Unlikely, given both that I'm taking a position against overreaction, and have insulted our guest of honor multiple times throughout this thread. You're the one with an emotional stake in this; my emotions started with concern, but at this point have settled on "amused" given that I don't rate there being any real danger of moderation.

I downvoted Nancy. Nancy! I've never downvoted Nancy, she always has a cool head.

You can argue that the harm isn't big enough to justify censorship of the post but claiming that no harm is caused to the community is plain wrong.

Anyone who leaves over this post isn't worth having in the first place. You, at least, argue your point, defend the community. Richard just declared the community shit and left.

He might be wrong, or he might be right - it doesn't matter. As the community exists, he didn't provide value. Any harm that was done, to create a community such that this trivial nonsense caused him to leave, long predates this trivial nonsense.

Or, to put it another way - the issue isn't that this post exists. The issue is that nothing existed to make it worth it to Richard to read posts like this. It's not like the community is overrun with poor content, that you have to sift through to find the good stuff. It's not like anybody will confuse this heavily-downvoted post with "the good stuff." There isn't any good stuff. There's just people competing with one another to prove who can be the most outraged over bad literature.

You know what a good community would have done with this post? Downvoted it and moved on to the next thing.

This post isn't a problem because it's bad. This post is a problem because it's the most exciting thing that's happened here this week.