Conversely, some of us don't hang out on sites that are an endless bombardment of political discourse. That sounds awful. The HN approach seems uniquely useful.

Conversely, some of us don't hang out on sites that are an endless bombardment of political discourse. That sounds awful. The HN approach seems uniquely useful. One or two post on an event, easily skipped over and ignored if you want with all the comments hidden behind clicking on that headline. Whole trees of comments trivially collapsed at will when they become uninteresting. It is actually a really great way of getting international news (including US news for me) and sampling opinions and commentary, even if it was not intended that way.