Meanwhile million dollar corporations buy accounts and astroturf with no penalty.
The little guy is silenced from sharing opinions/links that God Mods don't like, but the big corp can write off a marketing expense that looks like a mature organic account to God Mods.
You have no evidence of that, and neither do we (right now).
When we do get evidence of that, we crack down hard. We've done that in the past in two different $BigCo cases—but this is very rare. What's not rare is internet users making up stories about it based on their feelings. That's so common that the site guidelines ask HN users not to do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We unban accounts when they give us reason to believe that they'll follow the site guidelines in the future. You could start by following the site guideline which asks you to email such questions to hn@ycombinator.com rather than posting them to the threads. If your recent comment history looks good (spoiler: it mostly does), we'll be happy to oblige.
The little guy is silenced from sharing opinions/links that God Mods don't like, but the big corp can write off a marketing expense that looks like a mature organic account to God Mods.