Which is a good thing IMO. Not everything needs to be the next (or just another) digg/reddit/whatever. HN deliberately has a more specific focus than that of reddit, it is a feature not a flaw (if you watn everything to be reddit, then perhaps you would consider it a flawed feature).
> You can't even have decent political discussion here
Again, this is very deliberate. While there are some specific circumstances where significant political discussion is on-topic here, it generally isn't. See the very first section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html for official word on the matter.
Complaining that you can't have the political discussion that you want on a forum where politics is officially off-topic, is like complaining that you can't have the bacon cheese burger (with real pig and cow involved) that you want in the vegan restaurant you've decided to take lunch in.
Except this is disingenuous. There are political discussions found here, but one side is generally downvoted.
"The rule is already broken in one direction, so it should be right to break it in another" isn't a helpful take IMO.
You said that you saw one side being downvoted. I took that as meaning you thought it should be left alone like the other side is, when IMO that is not the solution. If both are off-topic (which they usually are, by my reading of the guidelines) both should be down-voted. The fix for the imbalance is not to encourage more but from other angles, it is to enforce the desired topic limits evenly.
(using the word "side" above may be ill-advised on my part, I know most matters are far more complex than a binary this-side-and-that-side, but better wording did not spring to mind)
You can, for example, debate pro-vs-anti nuclear power without necessarily getting downvoted. You can't post straight up climate change denial.
You can argue that the stackexchange moderator fiasco was incredibly badly handled. You can't post straight up homophobia.
Please don't post ideological flamebait to HN or take threads further into flamewar.
There is room for reasoned debate but many are incapable of it, especially on an internet forum.
I have never seen that on reddit. Every thread with politics in it seems to only allow one side of the discussion be heard, with the other being downvoted to oblivion. Which side is heard depends on the subreddit, but either way there is no discussion to be had.