You start by allowing "politics as a broader thing", flash forward a year, then you notice that at any given time, at least 20% of the frontpage is occupied by people screeching their throats raw with some incendiary hyper-partisan rhetoric.

The failure mode is rather obvious, and also extremely hard to avoid in practice.

▲

jackyinger 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You’ll note I never suggested that hackernews was the forum for this.

If that failure mode is inevitable in hackernews culture, what does that say about the quality of the technical & business content?

▲

ACCount37 an hour ago | parent [-]

"If putting rat poison in the burgers would cause people to die, what does this say about the quality of the burgers?"

Very little.

I've been told most hackers are humans - not machines or some kind of alien species. So I fully expect hackers to have the flaws people tend to do.

Partisan politics have a nasty habit of capitalizing on human flaws, and bringing out the worst in people who engage deeply in them. Which, in online communities, can have a self-reinforcing effect.

▲

jackyinger 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

I’m not talking about partisan politics.

Do some reading about political philosophy and you’ll see how terribly shallow partisan politics is, and how deep the foundations of politics are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_philosophy

	▲	ACCount37 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And yet we are talking about partisan politics. Because it's the lowest common denominator of politics. Because it's the failure mode. You can say "not all politics are actively toxic to human minds" and point at 18th century philosophical works all day long, but we both know that 18th century philosophical works were never the concern.