> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Well it's your site, so you can do what you want, but allowing these political threads is, in my opinion at least, really dragging down the quality of conversation across the site. It attracts users whose main contribution is willingness to initiate and prolong political flamewars.
There are far fewer outright political stories than there used to be. Probably fewer than ever, in fact. So if discussion quality is being dragged down, something else is dragging it.
As for this post, experience has taught us that when a story crosses a certain magnitude, there's no stopping it from getting discussed on HN, so we may as well have a single thread.
> There are far fewer outright political stories than there used to be. Probably fewer than ever, in fact.
I find that really difficult to believe, but you'd have access to stats and I don't. Maybe just confirmation bias on my part, or maybe disagreement on what's "outright political."
> As for this post, experience has taught us that when a story crosses a certain magnitude, there's no stopping it from getting discussed on HN, so we may as well have a single thread.
I gave you a curt reply above, so let me make up for that by thanking you for caring about the quality of HN. That's what matters most. It sounds like we largely agree anyhow. This thread is the rare case of being too big a story for normal moderation.
