Good post. What tends to happen on other forums I read (and even Usenet back in the day) is that the community would split in some way if this type of topic ov

Good post. What tends to happen on other forums I read (and even Usenet back in the day) is that the community would split in some way if this type of topic overload occured. i.e. too much politics talk = create a new politics subforum (or newsgroup, or subreddit) to siphon off the people that want to discuss those things. This hasn't happened on HN yet and probably can't since HN is really just a simple list of links w/discussion and not something that supports subforums (and at that point you're just cloning Reddit). So I'm not sure how you solve the overload issue without stringent moderation of some sort.