Well, you could say it's statistics. I dunno, I started a thread asking about what happened to the no-politics rule yesterday, but it got [dead]-ed after colle

Well, you could say it's statistics. I dunno, I started a thread asking about what happened to the no-politics rule yesterday, but it got [dead]-ed after collecting a few dozen comments. (In fairness, by phrasing my complaint as an "Ask HN" I might have been abusing the Ask HN system.) The other trouble with politics threads, though, is that the barriers to entry are so low. If the subject is thermodynamics or erlang then there's a certain amount of knowledge required to take part in the discussion, or even to find it interesting. But if the subject is "why is crime down" or "hey, what's up with people in the US not getting enough holidays" then anyone can chime in with their own opinion on the matter... or at least to throw their favourite political hobby horse into the mix (It's all about race! No wait, it's all about police corruption! No wait, it's all about white collar crimes going unprosecuted!) A major point of the no-politics rule was to keep the site looking as boring as possible to anyone not really interested in discussing the sort of stuff that the site is really supposed to be about.