As much as I'd love to pile on to this question, HN isn't a place for general political arguments, and this isn't a productive discussion for this site.
I wish we’d stop lying to ourselves about this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844
and in lots of previous places:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If anyone has a question that I haven't addressed in there, let me know and I'll be happy to answer.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
That's the zone that we hope HN threads will inhabit when addressing politicized topics. Of course it's unstable and frequently deteriorates, hence all the moderation comments we end up having to post. But I don't know of a better alternative. As I explained at the links mentioned upthread, we can't ban all politics and we can't just let such threads run raw either.
Political topics take over everything if you let them, so we have to moderate HN to prevent it from becoming all-politics-all-flamewar-all-the-time. Do you think we should just let it burn?
Nobody's trying to "enforce" anyone to "focus 100% on business". I do worry whether users' addictions to sites like this keep them from doing better things.
I assume someone, somewhere was once swayed by a random stranger to change their mind, but it doesn't happen often enough to outweigh the costs.