Odd and unusual? It matches the political climate of the US. We have a largely despised president with a small following of fanatics. This is what it looks like reflected on social media sites like HN.
As distastrious as it might be that this may be part now of US American culture, it doesn't need to start happening here nor be tolerated. The nature of this place is that we can talk with reason and share facts based on evidence. If people seek to disturb that, for whatever reason, I advocate for corresponding moderation.
> The nature of this place is that we can talk with reason and share facts based on evidence.
This has been the utopia of the tech nerd mentality for over 30 years since I first started using UseNet. The reality is, this kind "reasoned and fact-based" discussion model (a) doesn't really exist when there are subjective components or unknowably complexities, but worse (b) it is actually used to suppress discussion! The number of times I've observed discussion with people using "logic" to gatekeep is uncountable.
The fact of the matter is: some topics are messy and you can't just throw around "logic" and make it go away. Well, you can sequester yourself, but good luck with that.
I think the odd and unusual thing was that for a long time comments were mostly against the president and those comments were mostly being downvoted but now comments and votes look more correlated.
It might be that people genuinely dislike discussion of politics on here even on a thread that is about politics or that Trump's supporters here are more likely to have downvote buttons.
