We really need a new HN. The fact that people will downvote your comment, which is literally 100% correct, simply because they want to believe a falsehood, is pretty sad. This isn't Hacker News, it's Delusion News.
Another possibility is for downvotes to be public, and then allow people to "filter out" downvoters who seem politically motivated (a personal list would be fine, I assume it's like 5 people). HN can't really survive in the year 2025 without some radical anti-politics technology.
The usual HN solution to this problem is to just flag purely political stories and not discuss politics.
I agree any system that ranks posts purely on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes isn't well equipped to handle discussions of controversial topics. Unless there's a strong culture of respecting dissenting opinions it inevitably just turns into an echo chamber for one side or the other. There needs to be some way to filter out votes motivated by ideology rather than post quality.
X's Community Notes has the right idea I think, in that its algorithm takes into account the ideological biases of the voters and ranks notes based on the overall consensus across multiple ideological perspectives rather than just on whichever ideological perspective has the greatest total number of votes. That's a lot harder to implement though.
Another possibility is for downvotes to be public, and then allow people to "filter out" downvoters who seem politically motivated (a personal list would be fine, I assume it's like 5 people). HN can't really survive in the year 2025 without some radical anti-politics technology.