Dang can we keep US-centric politics off of HN for the next 2 months?
November of 2016 on HN was shitflinging without any benefit to anyone. Empty, useless outrage. News outlets have already started to champion whichever candidate they are aligned with for this November. If anyone needs their political news/drama fix, there is no shortage of it elsewhere.
Thank you ahead of time.
On the one hand, whatever HN is doing with the forum clearly works, in terms of fostering polite, rational discussion.
On the other, if the outside world goes further to pot, we may regret having missed opportunities to address that.
Maybe a compromise would be to have a new feature on HN: when a user posts a political item, the comment section could be disabled, but someone (the user? the mods? all users?) could add links to appropriate (for the story) third party discussion forums?
This feature would allow, for example, leftwing HN users to follow one "discuss off-site" link and make Trump Nazi comparisons, and rightwing users to follow another "discuss off-site" link where they can roll their eyes at Nazi comparisons.
If the feature had preset "groups", and the same third party forums popped up often enough, it could work out well. Someone could create a browser extension where the user chooses a persistent group, and the extension loads any political post off the appropriate forum, restyling it to look like the user is still on HN.