It's not the articles themselves. It's the quality of the commentary that comes from them. IMO these highly charged topics are very corrosive to the culture of

It's not the articles themselves. It's the quality of the commentary that comes from them. IMO these highly charged topics are very corrosive to the culture of a site. The people that post the hyper emotional comments on these posts and get rewarded in upvotes start doing the same thing throughout the site. Also in my experience if I post a low effort political comment I get much more karma from the crowd than a high effort technical post. What does that do for content incentives? It's my belief that the recent growth in both user count and highly emotionally charged low quality content on this site is directly proportional to the amount of hot button issues on this site. A decent amount of folks use this site as yet another culture war front. IMO these kinds of discussions need much, much more moderation than HN does to be productive. That's not a knock on HN moderation, it was never meant to be a structured debate platform. But taking a lightly moderated site and inundating it with hot button high emotion posts will not go well.