I believe that when the community gets this sort of inaccurate reflection of itself, it encourages a "why bother" sentiment and, downstream from that, a "fuck you" sentiment, since if no one is communicating anyhow, what else does it make sense to say?

In reality, is there any other non-siloed community site of HN's size, where divisive topics routinely arise, that manages to do better at "adult conversations"? I don't know of one. I know it feels like HN is the worst [1], but actually, in relative terms, this place has managed to plant at least one or two toes outside the inner circle of hell. Our task is to move another toe in that direction.

I wrote about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. Short version: it's because HN is less divisive that it feels more divisive, because this is the rare case of a large(ish) community that keeps itself in one piece instead of factoring into shards, silos, or social graphs. If that's true, then although we haven't realized it yet, the HN community is on the leading edge of the opportunity to learn to be different with one another, at least on the internet. This opportunity is precious and we need to become more conscious of it as a community, so we have a chance to do something with it other than collapse back into the moat.

[1] I do not mean to pick on you personally—it sucks to get singled out and I have zero intention of shaming. The truth is that most of us have this emotional perception of HN, including me. If you read the post I linked to above, there's a theory there of why that is.