zlacker

It isn't a question of individual threads but of overall behavior. If you're using HN primarily for ideological battle then you're not using it for intellectual curiosity, the intended use of the site. The two are not compatible. Worse, one destroys the other, so we have to moderate HN to keep that toxin below fatal levels.

We can't exclude politics altogether, nor would we want to. But we can't let it take over the site either, and it's like fire: it consumes everything it touches. This is a conundrum. Our way out of the conundrum is the 'primarily' test:

We ban accounts that use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle, regardless of which politics they favor. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We noticed that the most damage comes from users who don't care about much except their politics, while users who are interested in plenty of different things and occasionally post on politics tend to be benign. The first group is abusing the site while the second is using it as intended. That turned out to be a clear line that we can rely on as a standard for moderation.

We try to warn people first, especially when they've been on the site for a while, but if the pattern persists we do ban them. So would you please reread the site guidelines and use HN in the spirit of curiosity, not battle, from now on?

>>dang+(OP)
dang - I very much appreciate the fine line that HN toes here - I think there is much to be learned from genteel debate about issues of the day, moreover when you can push the ideologues out of the conversation, and instead refocus the debate on the actual issues at hand - this kind of environment allows people to learn and perhaps understand points of view that they would be unable to learn about otherwise because of the inherent echo chamber of their social network - in most debates there is some inherent truth to both sides of an argument, but usually we're too busy with out own cheering section to hear the other side of the discussion.