Maybe politics keep popping up because it's a conversation that needs to happen?
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.
It definitely needs to happen. From my perspective the question is whether it needs to happen here on HN. The answer is yes and no, for the reasons I linked to above.
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].
My working theory of the eigentweet is that it's more internal than people "wanting to target this audience." I don't think it requires much if any outside influence or explicit bad faith. (I'm a moderator on a non-American political subreddit, so most of my opinions below come from my own observations and musings.)
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.
Its usually when there is a fundamental difference between ideas where no compromise can be made. For example, I think cities should ban personal car use while others think this is a horrible idea. We could go on and on repeating these same conversations but its not particularly useful or interesting.
Maybe, maybe not. If the goal of both people in that discussion is to convert the other to their point of view, then yes, often times these discussions are not worth having. But we're not having private conversations here. The views of both sides can educate others who are participating in the discussion or even merely observing it. Sometimes it is good to watch a discussion on a topic you feel passionate about play out without participating. While you still might get irritated by those with opposing views, it's easier to digest what they are writing/saying when it's not directed to you individually. This helps with understanding why they have a differing view and in some cases, might even help you see a weakness in your own position that you never realized was there.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.