zlacker

Politics has never been completely off topic on HN. It's a grey area that needs to be decided case by case (i.e. thread by thread)—which unfortunately satisfies no one, but no other solution that I'm aware of is remotely feasible. It's neither desirable nor possible to ban all topics with political overlap (which includes most topics, after all); nor can we just let all political flames burn, because the site would become scorched earth in short order.

I've written extensive explanations about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... If anyone reads those and has a question that isn't answered yet, I'd like to know what it is. Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN.