What polite and civil online communities do people recommend for news and discussions around culture and politics, topics that are somewhat discouraged on HN?
My recommendation is to check out economics blogs and newsletters. I am a big fan of Noah, and there are a ton of great ones on Substack:
<a href="https://www.noahpinion.blog/" rel="nofollow">https://www.noahpinion.blog/</a><p>Why do I like these?<p>It switches the discussion to the impact and cost to society. This removes it from being a belief system and shifts it more to taking action and justifying it with data.<p>For example, if you want to build a wall across the USA / Mexico better, don't talk about why you believe that is important... let's talk about costs of building a wall of that size; let's talk about how effective it is based on data from areas with walls, let's talk about how much immigrants power the USA and contribute to our economy using data, let's talk about how we build houses without immigrants, let's talk about crime stats showing that immigrants commit less crime than non-immigrants, let's talk about how we can expand legal immigration to create more jobs for everyone, etc...<p>The comment section on Noah's Substack is great.
Find a small fediverse server on the topics. Lots of niche corners to explore<p><a href="https://fediverse.party/en/portal/servers/" rel="nofollow">https://fediverse.party/en/portal/servers/</a>