zlacker

>>notion+(OP)
It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days. I don't have links handy right now but may try to dig them up later*. It turns out that there's no faster way to politicize everything than to try something that simplistic. Wherever the optimum is for regulating the intense pressures HN is under, it's much less obvious than that.

It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490.

These explanations have become pretty stable by now—stable enough that I repeat myself incessantly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

*Edit: here's where we called it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251

>>dang+c7
Sorry, even after looking at those links and rereading your edited comment, I'm not sure I follow: How did it make things worse? Was it that "nothing even remotely political" was just way too broad?

>>yjftsj+v8
It turned every thread into a political battle and made every political side 10x madder at us than they already were.

>>dang+M8
Huh, that's unintuitive; thanks for explaining.

Edit: Oh, I wonder if it's a spillover effect; the amount of politics doesn't change, so having those threads on topic avoids spill over into other threads

>>yjftsj+ea
It doesn't seem counterintuitive to me. Of course people on a discussion forum who want to talk about a thing and are suddenly told they cannot talk about that thing are going to be upset.