I'm old enough to remember reddit before the days of subreddits. It wasn't a magnet for extreme content back then. That happened as a result of subreddits.
This.
And it's not just reddit. As long as you can create subgroups within communities you're eventually going to attract some problematic people. While something like CP on tumblr really brought it to light, tumblr was and still is home to some insanely extreme ideologies. Ideologies that some people find completely idiotic but which others truly believe in.
It's the same with other places, in case you weren't aware, Instagram has a ton of CP as well. With tags you can find dedicated groups of various different ideologies, a lot of them extremely problematic.
Same with Facebook and its tags/groups/whatever.
And of course Reddit and its subs.
This all stems from the fact that separating content into categories and tags that people can freely define, means that for people looking for extreme ideologies, it's trivial to find an echo chamber with just a tag or two.
Without extreme views you can't have progress: in a lot of countries, being for homosexual rights or abortion is extreme.
I think you might find that dealing with the legal consequences isn't a lot of fun. And I wonder if you'd really be so blasé about enabling that kind of content once you were actually looking at it on a daily basis.
Maybe that's where the real problem is.
Which is a good thing IMO. Not everything needs to be the next (or just another) digg/reddit/whatever. HN deliberately has a more specific focus than that of reddit, it is a feature not a flaw (if you watn everything to be reddit, then perhaps you would consider it a flawed feature).
> You can't even have decent political discussion here
Again, this is very deliberate. While there are some specific circumstances where significant political discussion is on-topic here, it generally isn't. See the very first section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for official word on the matter.
Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in.
Except this is disingenuous. There are political discussions found here, but one side is generally downvoted.
You can, for example, debate pro-vs-anti nuclear power without necessarily getting downvoted. You can't post straight up climate change denial.
You can argue that the stackexchange moderator fiasco was incredibly badly handled. You can't post straight up homophobia.
Please don't post ideological flamebait to HN or take threads further into flamewar.
"The rule is already broken in one direction, so it should be right to break it in another" isn't a helpful take IMO.
You said that you saw one side being downvoted. I took that as meaning you thought it should be left alone like the other side is, when IMO that is not the solution. If both are off-topic (which they usually are, by my reading of the guidelines) both should be down-voted. The fix for the imbalance is not to encourage more but from other angles, it is to enforce the desired topic limits evenly.
(using the word "side" above may be ill-advised on my part, I know most matters are far more complex than a binary this-side-and-that-side, but better wording did not spring to mind)
There is room for reasoned debate but many are incapable of it, especially on an internet forum.
I have never seen that on reddit. Every thread with politics in it seems to only allow one side of the discussion be heard, with the other being downvoted to oblivion. Which side is heard depends on the subreddit, but either way there is no discussion to be had.