Another thing I learned from that experiment is not to try experiments like that. Turns out it's bad to fuck with the firmware.
Stability is really important. HN is a site for intellectually interesting stories and discussion. That includes some political discussion, as I've explained at the links above. This has always been the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
That said, Hacker News is about intellectual curiosity, and people can be intellectually curious about things other than technology. Even politics can clear that bar, although it very rarely does here.
I want to say it was arc because that's what the site is written in, but I can't remember. This would have been like 10 years ago or so.
Maybe it pops up here because people have at least a modicum of hope that there will be a productive conversation even amongst the various downvote brigades?
I post political comments because even when they get downvoted to -4, they still end up with a long list of replies and sub-tangents in response to them. I think that's a healthy thing.
What people want to do and what should be done are entirely different things.
Okay I guess there's some exceptions, some dashboard tool isn't very political, but then again commenting on it is also not very interesting probably for that reason.
Edit: Oh. Found it. In "Meaning of Life", uttered shortly after this musical number. NSFW and liable to cause religious / political flamewars, but it makes the point, so here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ . You can skip to 6:09 for the line.
There's an interesting dynamic to this, btw. If HN manages to stay a degree or two more interesting than internet median [1], it attracts high quality users. That makes it a desirable audience. That makes a lot of people want to target this audience, so they blast it with rhetoric. Rhetoric isn't curious conversation and it thrives on repetition—so it makes HN worse.
In other words, to the degree that HN gets better, it gets worse. There's a cap on how good it can ever get [2].
[1] I'm not saying it's very good at this. But it's all relative, and what matters is outrunning the bear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25725436.
I triggered the second Erlang day and it made pg mad at me for the one and only time that I'm aware of. That was before I was dang.
What that tells me is that the forces creating the HN front page don't have much to do with changes in the userbase over time. That's interesting, and I think to most people (me included, and pg probably included) counterintuitive.
I don't think the two cases are comparable really. One was a uniting move while the other turned out to be a dividing move, though we didn't mean it that way. I bet if we appealed to HN to band together against some Redditesque adversary today, it would work just as well as it did back then.
My memory is hazy but I probably found out about HN via Slashdot or via Michael Arrington's HN post [0] from Mar. 10, 2008; so I have been reading HN since before Dec. 13, 2008 and still come back because of some really good conversations that can be had here, compared to elsewhere on the Internet.
0: https://techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/little-known-hacker-news-i...
There are a few other places you can do this, like the slate star codex culture war comment spinoffs: r/theMotte and https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php
Due to rightwingers often feeling unwelcome elsewhere a lot go to those places, meaning both communities think they need more leftists to balance things out.
After all, if you changed HN into a My Little Pony discussion site you'd lose 98% of old users, retaining the 2% who like ponies - and thereafter, 100% of remaining old users would like ponies.
Frankly, their election fraud thread - which has hundreds of comments demonstrating both extreme misunderstanding of statistics and the voting process, coupled with a willingness to make or support incredible claims without any substantive evidence or knowledge of the subject matter - says a lot about that community, in my view.
Instead, the decay of social media happens as the platform transitions from a place where one talks with people to a place where one talks at people.
If I reply to your political thoughts by telling you off, I'm probably not trying to convince you to change your mind. Instead, I'm performing for the attention (and upvotes / retweets / kind comments) of like-minded peers.
That's obviously alienating for the person who gets attacked, but this kind of performance is also self-radicalizing. The validating reinforcement preferentially goes to the strongest attacks or defenses, favouring rhetoric (as you noted) rather than substance.
One of the few things that suppresses this cycle is exactly what HN does reasonably well: have the community be about something else, diluting political content such that there's less often a chain-reaction.