zlacker

That seems like not a great mood when the nation (USA) is apparently under attack by domestic terrorists. I can understand if people are just being overly political, but it's hard to be political when a sizeable faction of the country evidently thinks it's time for the US experiment to get cancelled.

>>stjohn+(OP)
The OP was an experiment from 4 years ago. We haven't done anything like that since, nor will we.

Even at the time there was no intention to get rid of politics on HN permanently, but it turns out if you say "we're just trying X for a week", people hear "we're instituting X". That's one lesson it taught me.

In the end, I think we got to the right place about how to handle political topics on HN. It isn't entirely simple, but it's as simple as possible, and it works, and it has proven stable. More on that in the links up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785637.