zlacker

I think the HN guidelines have always discouraged politics, so this isn't exactly new. I'm guessing the mods have gotten a lot of complaints about the volume of what many people see as off-topic submissions and discussions.

> 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.

>>burkam+(OP)
This is a site for computer science and entrepreneurship, right? Over the past few months I've seen a lot of posts unrelated to those two topics and it seems like Reddit is very much bleeding into here, not just politics.

My opinion is that this place is great for two reasons: It's narrow focus on one topic, and a userbase that consists of experts in that one topic. When Hacker News strays from it's area of expertise I feel that Gell-Mann Amnesia is apparent and the quality of discussion much lower. Again not just for the politics but for other random news as well.

>>koube+U1
This is a site for "hackers", which is an intentionally vague term, and it's not supposed to be limited to just CS and startups, although that's obviously the main audience.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.