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Me too. The conversations political posts foster on this platform are the lowest-quality I've ever seen here, and nearly all of the headlines and articles are s

Me too. The conversations political posts foster on this platform are the lowest-quality I've ever seen here, and nearly all of the headlines and articles are some variant of "Look at what horrible thing the GOP/rich people are doing!!!" and the constant expectation of outrage is what I can get on mainstream news. HN does not have any unique angle or personalities that can comment on these topics, and it basically devolves into a "blue team good, red team bad" and a few -50 libertarians in every single article. A Markov chain could write the comment threads.

DanielBMarkham 9y ago
"A Markov chain could write the comment threads." One wonders if one could construct a quality system for message boards that uses markov chains to predict common comment patterns and then reduce their visibility. This would create a system similar to Amazon's "statistically unique phrases" view of books. Might be interesting to play around with.
baybal2 9y ago
>nearly all of the headlines and articles are some variant of "Look at what horrible thing the GOP/rich people are doing!!!" and the constant expectation of outrage is what I can get on mainstream news. For this article, I'd say, it does qualify +5 on informative, and 0.5 on flamebait. It clearly worth attention
richardknop 9y ago
When I want to talk politics I go to a political forum I am a member off (one of the oldest political forum websites out there). Even there there's slight political slight in one direction but at the very least, given how old the forum is, there are members with tens of thousands of posts and great reputation (since they have been part of community for a decade) representing all different political affiliations.
- bertjk 9y ago
  Care to share which forum? I'm very interested in seeing what a political forum that is as you described looks like.
kbenson 9y ago
There are multiple solutions to this problem as you've explained it. - Ignore the article. - Ignore the comments. - Participate but try to raise the level of discourse. Note how complaining in the comments about how political stories are a problem is not a solution. That's because it's at best being ignored, but more likely adding noise to the discussion or starting an obfuscating thread about it, like this whole thread. The only thing complaining does is possibly make the comment writer feel slightly better by being able to vent, but at the expense of everyone else. I hope you and the others at least got that little bit out of your comments, because at least there's some small benefit to this thread then (that's not meant to be snide, I truly do think it's a better outcome than this being a complete waste of time).

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

"A Markov chain could write the comment threads." One wonders if one could construct a quality system for message boards that uses markov chains to predict common comment patterns and then reduce their visibility. This would create a system similar to Amazon's "statistically unique phrases" view of books. Might be interesting to play around with.

baybal2 9y ago

>nearly all of the headlines and articles are some variant of "Look at what horrible thing the GOP/rich people are doing!!!" and the constant expectation of outrage is what I can get on mainstream news. For this article, I'd say, it does qualify +5 on informative, and 0.5 on flamebait. It clearly worth attention

richardknop 9y ago

When I want to talk politics I go to a political forum I am a member off (one of the oldest political forum websites out there). Even there there's slight political slight in one direction but at the very least, given how old the forum is, there are members with tens of thousands of posts and great reputation (since they have been part of community for a decade) representing all different political affiliations.

bertjk 9y ago
Care to share which forum? I'm very interested in seeing what a political forum that is as you described looks like.

kbenson 9y ago

There are multiple solutions to this problem as you've explained it. - Ignore the article. - Ignore the comments. - Participate but try to raise the level of discourse. Note how complaining in the comments about how political stories are a problem is not a solution. That's because it's at best being ignored, but more likely adding noise to the discussion or starting an obfuscating thread about it, like this whole thread. The only thing complaining does is possibly make the comment writer feel slightly better by being able to vent, but at the expense of everyone else. I hope you and the others at least got that little bit out of your comments, because at least there's some small benefit to this thread then (that's not meant to be snide, I truly do think it's a better outcome than this being a complete waste of time).