Interesting how having intellectual curiosity as the goal, rather than the ubiquitous 'an inclusive space where everyone can feel safe', has ended up in a forum that's much 'safer' and less toxic than most places on the Internet.
replies(5):
Even then it only appears so to those commenters, any thread talking about healthcare, legal rights etc etc has the same festering underbelly of hatred you'll find on any comment section from a newspaper.
The major reason you can have this perspective is that a lot of these contentious subjects are blanket banned, the inevitable firestorm in the comments can't happen if the thread isn't allowed.
The commentariat's genteel reputation also evaporates once you step into the "political" threads HN does allow, namely immigration, outsourcing and of course, crime in San Francisco.
A former head of state in Ycombinator's home country is headed to trial, and a coup plotter in the world's current largest military conflict is apparently dead. Both of these are historic events, but you'd never know that on HN.
Plenty of stories with political overlap [1] still get discussed on HN. Your list seems cherry-picked to me - presumably because those are the topics you dislike, and mostly people overemphasize, and are more likely to notice, the data points they dislike [2].
I'm not sure where you got the idea that HN doesn't have rules, but it does, and they certainly exclude abusing other members [3], doxxing [4], etc.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...