Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week (2016)
It made things worse and we ended the experiment after a couple days.  I don't have links handy right now but may try to dig them up later*. It turns out that there's no faster way to politicize everything than to try something that simplistic. Wherever the optimum is for regulating the intense pressures HN is under, it's much less obvious than that.It was a success in the sense that we learned a lot. If anyone wants to know about that, a lot of it is in the explanations here:https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902396.These explanations have become pretty stable by now—stable enough that I repeat myself incessantly: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...*Edit: here's where we called it off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251