

Ask HN: What is the 'hacker news' for politics?  - rubyrescue

I was reading a series of nonsensical, ranting comments on blogs like politico, sites like NYT, and WSJ, guardian, etc... and it just struck me - why is there no "hacker news" for politics - good debate, differing opinions, a general attitude of respect for differences. I'm most interested in US and UK politics but as I live in South America would appreciate a site that covers other countries. And if it doesn't exist, is it a startup idea worth building?
======
jamesteow
There's a couple key issues with it: current comment voting techniques don't
do a good job of differentiating validity from user sentiment (how many times
have you had someone need to rebuke the community for using the arrows to
denote disagreement?)

Secondly, you will always to deal with trolls. If you have mechanisms in place
to make people spend less time responding to trolls, you'll retain the sanity
of the sane users and diminish incentives from trolls.

Thirdly, you have to rethink the way stories are voted on.

Thankfully, we're building that. If you sign up on forrus.org, I'll let you
know when we roll these features out which should be in a month. We're
actively just inviting people who are enthusiastic about these ideas because
we want to grow the community slowly but with lots of quality.

------
polyfractal
Political discussions tend to derail into ideological rants far more often
than technical matters. They also tend to turn into echo chambers, attracting
like-minded individuals who circle-jerk their own opinions.

That said, I'm a fan of Debate and Discussion subforum of SomethingAwful,
which is remarkably intelligent and reasonable (although admittedly slanting
heavily towards liberals and libertarians).

~~~
jrsmith1279
That's where the comment voting would help, but I guess it's still not a
perfect system. I really just want a place where I can have political
discussions/debates with people who form their opinions based on facts instead
of being strictly democrat/republican because that's the way their parents
brought them up.

------
reinhardt
It doesn't make sense for the same reasons that a 'Hacker news' for religion
doesn't. People attracted in such topics are usually too invested emotionally
in their personal beliefs to entertain the idea they might be wrong.

~~~
michaeldhopkins
This is why any successful political community needs to be largely made up of
people with the same beliefs, just like almost everyone at Hacker News
believes the same thing about startups and are too emotionally invested to
change their beliefs.

------
jrsmith1279
My brother and I had this exact idea and started to build it, but we've both
been too busy with our normal jobs to be able to do anything with it. We even
have a pretty decent domain name (I think).

------
impendia
Many of the comments on online Economist articles are excellent.

------
JesseAldridge
createdebate.com is the closest thing I've seen. But it isn't that good. I
think a good political debate site is definitely worth building.

------
mangala
reddit.com/r/politics

~~~
dantheman
That is not a good site for politics, unless you like the echo chamber.
r/politics is dominated by one group, another group has their own subreddit
etc.

