Or heck, just about any sort of forum you can discuss the subject that isn't filled with idiots, flame wars and fights about every little thing?
Because the signal to noise level at most political forums and subreddits I've seen is ridiculous, and I feel it'd be neat to find somewhere you can talk about politics and society in a more reasonable way instead.
Why do I say it would be hard to make?
I came up with this thought about politics and religion specifically years ago that I think still holds true.
"It's hard to get people to think their way [around] positions they never really thought their way into"
Most people come by their politics by assimilating their family or communities, especially in college, and never really think to question.
It becomes a deep part of their identity.
And if you question their politics it's as if you are insulting them.
It's hard to have a solid conversation about a subject when both sides feel constantly personally attacked...
It's very hard to remove that element and speak clearly about ideas on their own merits.
I, without a doubt, formed my opinions largely because of my family (against my moderately-strong conservative family), not that much because of my community (my high school friends had very neutral political leanings), and definitely prior to college (high school).
I feel that many opinions are formed by high school friend groups and rarely questioned beyond that and that community is only important in generally shaping that high school exposure and experience.
However, since the presidential election, things have devolved into sheer anger. On the right, it's defending indefensible behavior (IMO, obviously). On the left, it's grasping more and more ridiculous legal theories and overreacting to trivial culture-war provocations. On both sides, the tit-for-tat has increased exponentially.
This forum has some very rational people who (outside of the politics threads) are very intelligent and sane on many subjects. The fact that this group can't manage it tells me that right now, I don't think anyone can.
You can get help in #lobsters on Freenode. If you know Rails, deploying to Heroku is an afternoon job; using the provided ansible scripts on a bare VPS is a day or two.
I'd strongly recommend checking out the moderation at https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview. They deal with difficult political topics on a daily basis and generally have very high-quality discussion.
There are plenty of such echo chambers available for both liberals and conservatives. Facebook is the most obvious one. Twitter is another, if you follow people aligned with your ideology. CNN and MSNBC offer almost exclusively liberal slants on the news of the day and will quickly satisfy any desire you have to hear liberal echoes, while Fox News is a largely conservative echo chamber. As far as forums, liberals might go here [1] for example, while conservatives might go here [2].
[1] https://www.liberalforum.org/
[2] http://www.conservativesforum.com/
A site like that would be filled with the programmer equivalent of vim vs emacs.
In a subject like politics, there isn't anywhere for 'the middle' to go discuss things rationally. By 'the middle' I mean people that may be affiliated with a party (or not) and aren't gung-ho about everything that party aligns with. That might actually be a neat name for it... get people to come together and see "the other side" from "the middle".
Okay I answered my own question about "to what end?" - to get people talking with each other online instead of shouting into echo chambers like FB, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
It would be neat to have a strongly moderated (no content trolls), strong account policy forum to go to.