You figure the rest.
HN has all potential (the participants) to make clash fruitful; unfortunately, it lacks systems to prevent dead ends. (It is a pity though: well thought and mature ideas lost diluted in the space, and not meeting their natural matches in strenghtening, refinement, correction.) It is not "perfect" as a debate platform (it's not built to be a perfect debate platform as a goal - that would require proper exposure of different ideas and ingenuous organization of the confrontation spaces and methods).
There are very few human interaction spaces where such opinions are given oxygen, and it's usually done in a highly-codified context.
What I find most interesting is that on HN, the Correct Thought depends on the time of day. I have seen quite a few comments that either didn't get any votes or even got a few upvotes in the European morning. Then, later that day, when the US folks start reading it, the upvotes disappear and the comments got downvoted. Seen that several times...
> Although Ascian is their mother tongue, adult Ascians don't understand plain Ascian sentences, unless they are direct quotations from governmental propaganda materials (called Correct Thought). So, in order to communicate, an Ascian has to know by heart thousands of these quotations (sentences) on many different topics.