I know politics are one of the more polarizing things to discuss, but are there any decent communities that have a similar level of respect and discourse to HN?
The closest thing I know of is a subreddit:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/</a><p>Pretty well moderated and mostly rational if left leaning (not an issue for me but...)
Others have mentioned several subreddits; I would like to recommend r/NeutralPolitics. I occasionally browse it and I'm blown away by the quality of the discussion compared to the discussions at other popular political subreddits, e.g. r/politics. Neutralpolitics's success is probably due to its rules and moderation, which help promote constructive discussion, and its lesser traffic compared to other political subreddits, meaning that it doesn't suffer from the unconstructive comments that result from the popular audience.
The best resource for dispassionate, objective and accurate information regarding international politics that I know of is actually a YouTube channel called Caspian Report. I have literally never found another place, in the physical world or the digital world, where people are dedicated to being objective about political or human issues. Hackernews is very bad in this respect and it has gotten really bad recently. I've been on this website for years and years so it's not the illusion mentioned by the moderators -- I'm pretty sure that there has been a large influx of people who used to be on Reddit exclusively. Refugees who were driven out by reddits own disasterous decline in quality. This website can in fact be found when Google searching "Reddit alternatives." This is extremely sad because if hackernews dries up then I have no idea where to go.