HN is an excellent venue, but is necessarily text oriented, which is an OK tradeoff I think.
My next project after Stack Overflow, Discourse, is an 100% open source, flexible multimedia-friendly discussion system. It's GPL V2 on the code side, but we also tried to codify Creative Commons as the default license in every install, so discussion replies belong to the greater community: https://discourse.org
(Surprisingly, the default content licenses for most discussion software tend to be rather restrictive.)
Could you afterwards build a discussion Platform to find (partial) agreement in various political etc topics? That seems like it would have huge impact and is really missing.. thought about starting something like that but never got to it.
Still there seems to be only a sandbox install. Why can't we have discourse just like stackoverflow just with technical discussions allowed instead of attacked by both mods and the rules.
