[time_to_smile]

Another problem is that nearly everyone's "political" views have been reduced to just talking points and strange dogmatic behavior.

As a counter example consider someone who could no longer exist online even if he, sadly, had not passed: Erik Naggum

Erik certainly expressed political views in many of his comments, but at the same time it's very hard to box his thinking into any mainstream political narrative. I think today he would be both unwelcome on Twitter and HN or any more conservative sites. Erik represents a lot of what I remember and miss about earlier forums: strongly held personal beliefs that don't fit into any one particular bucket.

Individuals having diverse views within their own system of beliefs is what allowed us to have meaningful political discussions in the past because 3 people could talk about 3 different topics and the group could reasonably be split 2 vs 1 on all topics with completely different splits each time.