another question I had was what are your thoughts on spinning off a politics.news.ycombinator.com or some other official link from here, and letting the people that want to do politics have a space separate from the main site?
I don't know who would both want to and be good at moderating that.
Also, I'm not sure it would make sense for YC to fund it. HN is in a sweet spot that way [1] but the sweet spot is a fairly constrained corner of the internet, different but analogous to how I described the political constraints in my reply above [2]. I doubt it's possible to modify one variable very much while keeping the others fixed.
One big problem with that is there'd be constant tension about what political thingies were important enough to be on the "main" site; we'd just instantly recapitulate all the problems we have now, while also supporting a site full of inevitably awful threads as a sort of attractive nuisance.
