A realist view looks at the various players and makes an informed judgment of what their power is. Alex Miller indisputably has final say on who attends the conference. That doesn't make him a dictator. If he doesn't follow people like Steve Klabnik and Alex Payne on stuff like this, the personal and business consequences to him will be immense. As his statement says, he hasn't read Yarvin's political writings. Nevertheless it took him only a few hours to decide that it would not be possible to have Yarvin present. Is that not strong evidence that Miller felt his options were limited?
That’s how it is for dictators, too. They look at the world and make decisions designed to to optimize for the outcomes the desire, without compromising their values.
Let’s say that people on HN decide that they don’t want to attend any conference that has a Code of Conduct, because that interferes with their “right to free speech.”
If a conference organizer decides that HN is enough of a market that they tear up their CoC, that’s their decision. We don’t say that somehow, they have less free will because of the actions of HN. Their options aren’t limited. They chose to do something that involved HN.
If Alex doesn’t like this kind of controversy, Alex can stop running conferences. Sure there are actions by all sorts of players in a complex world, but the buck for every decision stops somewhere, and in this case, it stops with Alex.
