Of course the politics discussion is going to be lower quality than the startup discussion. We have practical experience with startups. That doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile to discuss things other than hacking and startups.

Social news has been around for two years. Giving one example doesn't mean a whole lot, especially when the community of reddit is fundamentally different from the community of news.ycombinator. The editors of reddit believe in non-intervention. The editors of news.yc believe in active and regular intervention, which means that news.yc won't turn into reddit.

The discussion in this thread isn't anywhere close to what you see on reddit. We have a problem when discussions start actually polluting the site. But they haven't yet, so I don't understand what the problem is.

We need to consider exactly what we don't want to allow on this site. See my new thread.