The problem for me is that the political stuff has perfect substitutes that I can easily go to, but I don't know of any alternatives for the skeptical, intelligent tech+business discussion.
That's an interesting way of putting it. I first came on here to learn about Arc. It was just tech. Then it became tech+business. What you're seeing is simply that at scale, politics is inextricable from tech+business, just as, at scale, business is inextricable from tech.
For me, the issue is that the legal and political (and to a growing degree, the business) discussions here are totally uninteresting; I'm not particularly interested in engaging in those sorts of conversations anywhere. But there are so many really great posters who have such strong, smart technical opinions that I keep coming back.
Tagging might help, at least at the story submission level.
Indeed! This exact same conversation happened on reddit several years ago. The community became diverse enough that a large group of users didn't like the posts the other groups up votes to the homepage. There were initial suggestiona that tags were the best solution but the reddit gang put together subressits and it's been the greatest change to the site since it started.
Looking forward to subscribing to the best sub-hackernewses.
Each Reddit post only goes on one subreddit, but if HN allows posts to have more than one tag, then it could be active in several sub-HNs, one for each tag.
This is the same difference as between traditional email folders and gmail tags.
Heh. But to be fair, different technologies encourage different usage patterns, and it's reasonable to investigate how, given a goal, technological solutions could be applied. I'm plenty leery of "solutionism" [1], but that's not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I can discuss politics with politicians and economics with economists, but I still like to discuss both with people I like for no other reason than because I like them.
I can't think of anywhere that I can read a discussion on technology politics that's actually dominated by informed, educated technologists. With the best will in the world, the Guardian Comment Is Free section or /r/news doesn't have the quality of commentary.
