Ask HN: HN Political News Overload?
I've written a lot about this topic, but let's see if I can sum it up:<p>* Politics are way more important than most of what we talk about.  So if we talk politics, we could easily fill the front page with it, and crowd out all the unimportant tech stuff.  Who cares about Bootstrap when people are throwing bananas at a minister in the Italian government because she's black?<p>* People don't seem to get that you can compartmentalize: I care deeply about politics, but I also like having a high quality tech site that is about tech and startups.  On these threads, people say that if I don't want politics on HN, I must not care about politics at all.  Couldn't be farther from the truth.  I also love to follow professional cycling, but I don't want politics on those sites either.<p>* Way more people care about politics than the stuff that makes HN HN.  If we open the floodgates, it will attract lots of people who will dilute the site.  As noted elsewhere, I think this is something of a feedback loop.<p>* I don't like the divisiveness of the subject.  There are frequent posters here who have said they are Republicans, and given their statements on religion, maybe they're even in favor of <i>$a_very_divisive_issue</i>.  I <i>do not</i> want to get into that discussion with them.  It won't help anyone, will likely alienate people from the site, will probably lead to hurt feelings, and so on and so forth.  I want to talk with these people about tech and startups.  That's what we have in common.<p>* The quality of many of these discussions is not high, and for anyone who has been on this planet for a little while, little of it is a new or interesting contribution to the subjects under discussion.  You can find the same topics discussed all over the internet, in every language.<p>* I think that the site has been "holed below the waterline" by the NSA stuff and the subsequent flood of articles, as well as the "outrage" articles about various grave injustices.  Those tend to get a lot of upvotes and heated discussion too.  I do not think that it will recover unless PG & Co start moderating it in a more heavy handed way.