"Stories about, say, the US elections are of equal importance to everyone, and fail that test."

--I think that is wrong. US elections are important to americans (and maybe some foreigners that are into foreign politics). You can be a hacker, and not an amercian, so you don't care much about US elections.

I'm using everyone very loosely as "a broader community", and not actually every person on the planet, if that wasn't apparent.

Another huge problem with Reddit. There was so much coverage on the US elections non-US citizens would get upset and everyone else would use the mentality "Well it got upmodded, this is what we want to see and you're just going to have to deal with it." Gladly we dont have that mentality here, it reflects too much of the .NET developers being tourists and look at everything with the "us" and "everything else" pattern.

Very destructive.

One of the problems with Reddit since Wired took over is the dominance of all kinds of political discussions on the front page, both US and world news. It really brought the site down, IMHO.

That's denying the impact the US economy/foreign policy has, for better or for worse, in the rest of the world.

I'm not "american", but considering the Internet Neutrality will be decided by the next administration I really care about the US elections right now.

But there's really no need to hear about it until it's decided if you can't do anything to change it (i.e. you are not a voter in the US, nor have influence with any large number of them). I'm Canadian and, though I will be affected by the future actions of the US, there's nothing I can really do to affect them back, so the news of the presidency will probably only reach me a few days after the election, when someone mentions it over coffee.

You have a point. I'd also prefer not to read that kind of news in this site, unless they are related to the tech world (like an interview at the Googleplex).

The tabloid and flamebait techniques can, unfortunately, be effectively employed while remaining entirely within the hacker's topics of interest. I'll spare the naming of specific blogs or yc submissions...

Certainly, but it eliminates an entire category of posting about things that are relevant "because hackers live on the same planet everyone else does", which, true as it may be, doesn't justify dumping the tight focus this site has had on hacker/startup oriented topics.

Two separate concerns, both valid.