This really is the most friendly forum I've been on that isn't something ultra-specific like crownvic.net
Its not perfect of course, neither am I.
But centering your ideological bubble is its own form of toxicity that is enabled by the internet.
Such as? Are any of those disagreements ideological?
If that all sounds too non-spicy, well, even mentioning the smaller things like JS vs TS on a mainstream Reddit page got people calling me a moron and my comment hidden because the score got too low. If I said it on a different page, maybe it would've been +100 score and everyone disagreeing with me booted instead, but that's not any better. Learned quickly not to bother with there.
HN isn't really a place for plain political discussions, so I don't participate in those. They do exist though, and end up getting locked. I'd probably be more right-wing than most.
Also using reddit as a baseline is like using a cesspool tank as a baseline of sanitation.
So what is your non-cesspool forum example that isn't Reddit? Twitter seemingly got taken over by bots early on, Facebook pages were a disaster at least when I was in college, and those are the big ones.
X optimizes for engagement and as studies have shown, that means optimizing for rage bait.
Reddit optimizes for rage bait too but includes a voting system that hides unpopular opinions, so any person that conflicts with the majority is marginalized. So on top of being full of rage bait, its an echo-chamber and that is before even talking about the powermod problem.
HN is much like reddit in style, so fundamentally HN also tends towards an echo chamber.
And by echo chamber, I mean a cringe circle jerk: a New Yorker article called it "performative erudition".
Gotta say though, it's rich hearing this from New Yorker.