I don't feel that Hacker News is swamped with off-topic discussions. I'm not having to wade through political or social commentary to find articles about Haskell, video adapters or Javascript. In fact, a quick look at the front page indicates that less than 5% of it isn't technical in some way - and more than 80% is entirely technical.

I say we avoid putting things in place to avoid problems we don't have yet :->