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Unfortunately, the HN conversation structure, while great for technical discussions, does not function well for political discussions.

I wish there were a similar site for reasonable political debate, but the moderation required would probably be too expensive.

Could you elaborate on that point about structure? I’m curious what you mean.

I mean the tree structure, the crowd-sourced moderation (flagging and downvotes), and promoting/hiding content based on votes.

When the topic isn't controversial, that all tends to promote the best comments.

But when the topic is controversial, it simply makes one point of view dominant. (The "hivemind" as redditors say.)