[trjordan]

Agreed, this is hard. My personal benchmark is: does this article have information that would change a political viewpoint? If so, then political talk feels like fair game.

Story where the NSA creates a practical quantum computer? Let's talk about what this means.

Story where a researcher makes incremental progress towards a quantum computer? Let's not talk about how long it will be until the NSA can break all crypto.

It's definitely a grey area, but I do there there are tiers of political talk. The best discussions have reactions to new information, not re-hashed and pre-established opinions.

[davidw]

> does this article have information that would change a political viewpoint?

Now that is a "unicorn" in the sense of a mythical beast! You can dig into usenet archives from the 80ies, and find people debating a lot of the same stuff they do today. People mostly do not change their minds about things.

[drzaiusapelord]

>Story where the NSA creates a practical quantum computer? Let's talk about what this means.

And who is going to keep the comments on track? The typical anti-US people will come out in droves to derail. So we'll end up with the same issues, but instead we'll have political filtering done on the accepted articles themselves that could generate bias.

Its not like all these people will suddenly stick to the topic. In fact, I find many articles that involve India, China, Russia, Brazil, etc usually have a top comment of "But the US is worse." There's a lot of knee-jerk anti-US sentiment here and filtering things out isn't going to change that.

[AnimalMuppet]

Perhaps you missed where they are moderating comments, not just stories.