Because the signal to noise level at most political forums and subreddits I've seen is ridiculous, and I feel it'd be neat to find somewhere you can talk about politics and society in a more reasonable way instead.
Why do I say it would be hard to make?
I came up with this thought about politics and religion specifically years ago that I think still holds true.
"It's hard to get people to think their way [around] positions they never really thought their way into"
Most people come by their politics by assimilating their family or communities, especially in college, and never really think to question.
It becomes a deep part of their identity.
And if you question their politics it's as if you are insulting them.
It's hard to have a solid conversation about a subject when both sides feel constantly personally attacked...
It's very hard to remove that element and speak clearly about ideas on their own merits.
I, without a doubt, formed my opinions largely because of my family (against my moderately-strong conservative family), not that much because of my community (my high school friends had very neutral political leanings), and definitely prior to college (high school).
I feel that many opinions are formed by high school friend groups and rarely questioned beyond that and that community is only important in generally shaping that high school exposure and experience.
However, since the presidential election, things have devolved into sheer anger. On the right, it's defending indefensible behavior (IMO, obviously). On the left, it's grasping more and more ridiculous legal theories and overreacting to trivial culture-war provocations. On both sides, the tit-for-tat has increased exponentially.
This forum has some very rational people who (outside of the politics threads) are very intelligent and sane on many subjects. The fact that this group can't manage it tells me that right now, I don't think anyone can.
You can get help in #lobsters on Freenode. If you know Rails, deploying to Heroku is an afternoon job; using the provided ansible scripts on a bare VPS is a day or two.
I'd strongly recommend checking out the moderation at https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview. They deal with difficult political topics on a daily basis and generally have very high-quality discussion.
There are plenty of such echo chambers available for both liberals and conservatives. Facebook is the most obvious one. Twitter is another, if you follow people aligned with your ideology. CNN and MSNBC offer almost exclusively liberal slants on the news of the day and will quickly satisfy any desire you have to hear liberal echoes, while Fox News is a largely conservative echo chamber. As far as forums, liberals might go here [1] for example, while conservatives might go here [2].
A site like that would be filled with the programmer equivalent of vim vs emacs.
In a subject like politics, there isn't anywhere for 'the middle' to go discuss things rationally. By 'the middle' I mean people that may be affiliated with a party (or not) and aren't gung-ho about everything that party aligns with. That might actually be a neat name for it... get people to come together and see "the other side" from "the middle".
Okay I answered my own question about "to what end?" - to get people talking with each other online instead of shouting into echo chambers like FB, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
It would be neat to have a strongly moderated (no content trolls), strong account policy forum to go to.
Welcome to the internet!
Any forum based medium will and should allow for dissenting opinions. Even some bordering on what you might consider idiotic. It is easy to bait people into a fight specially when you call them wrong. So, you will see lots of troll behavior and ensuing fights. And with time lots and lots of flamewar.
1) Look for local options (city and state level in the US, or even neighborhood level sometimes), and particularly on focused but not too focused areas. I've come across good local transportation oriented forums and I would guess there are decent local forums for things like education, foster care, environment, and health care. One of the better ways of getting information is via people who are on various advisory committes, so look for forums that those people participate in. I've also heard that it can be fairly easy to get on one of those committes yourself. Maybe twelve years ago or so I found the Pittsburgh Policy Issues Online Forum when I lived in Pittsburgh that was set up by the current mayor (Bill Peduto), who was then a city council member. He didn't participate himself and I wasn't super impressed at the time but in retrospect even having a few people in city government posting occasional responses about details of particular issues was better than almost anything else I've seen. Now almost all traces of its existance have been removed from the web (searchable web at least). I've wondered what the people running it thought of the experience.
2) Forcasting, detailed discussions aimed at predicting what will actually happen rather than what should happen. Look at Good Jugdement Open:
3) Forget online discussion and make friends with a journalist and/or find local groups. I think in general the closer you get to particular current issues (and the people actually making the decisions) the more the discussion is restrained by the current political environment in that particular area, but also the more detail you get. I've heard that it can be shockingly easy to have a direct impact on local politics outside of areas that powerful interests care most about.
4) There might be better discussions hiding behind the key word "ethics" or something similar rather than politics directly. In a way you can split politics into a) the details of things like what is required to make particular policy changes and what are the likely or actual results of such a change and b) what should the goals be. For b, you are likely to get a better discussion if it is mostly removed from current politics.
5) Put less effort into finding discussion opportunities and more effort into finding people writing with more detailed perspectives. Some journalists go into much more detail than others. These days lots of people previously involved in politics have blogs and some write in detail. It is easier to track down a bunch of interesting writers individually than a forum. Sometimes those blogs have comment areas that are decent or you could start your own politics blog. Also, published books can be a great source of information due to the longer write/edit/print cycle and authors being selected more for long term interest and expertise.
Edit: Also, look for multiple perspectives on history. In addition to history being generally important in politics, you can often find detailed discussions of what are now heated political issues.