Meaning no offense, it is quite naive to assume that the level of discussion about very controversial political topics on here will be any better than, say, on

Meaning no offense, it is quite naive to assume that the level of discussion about very controversial political topics on here will be any better than, say, on a random subreddit. Sure, memes and one liners do not do well on Hacker News, but on the other hand, most "hackers" believe they are smarter and with better opinions than anybody else, which is often just a severe case of Dunning-Kruger. And the population of this site post Reddit fiasco is no different than Reddit anyway; how many Eternal Septembers have we gone through? Your account has been created pre-COVID, so you must have witnessed that some topics should just be avoided for the sake of anybody's sanity, whether it's on HN or not. In general, up/down vote systems just create echo chambers, not interesting and nuanced discussions. I might be the stereotypical old man yelling at clouds, but I miss when this place was about startups, programming and Wozniak-tier hackers, not an Ars Technica with a Bay Area accent that attracts anybody calling themselves a "techie" to discuss the daily news.