[dang]

That's to be expected with any divisive topic on the internet, which that one certainly is.

> It seemed every bit as tribal as twitter

The active ingredient there is the word 'seemed'. If you look closer and deeper, you'll see that HN is an experiment in a completely different sort of site—not just from Twitter, but from all the other major ones. This is partly because of the values it was founded with*, but equally because of the initial conditions of its design—primarily the fact that it's non-siloed, meaning there are no follow lists or social graphs or any of the other devices that online communities use to partition themselves. That has profound effects.

I've written about this many times. The most in-depth attempt was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. There are others at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all...

* Primarily intellectual curiosity. Note: when I say HN was founded on that value I am not saying that it always, or even mostly, lives up to it. Just that it's in the DNA and that makes a difference.