| No political content ever is a community growth stance and business strategy. It is the right call, by frikking far. There are a 3-4 horsemen of the apocalypse for online communities. The first two are most definitely politics and religion. If these two topics are allowed on your forum, you are pretty much done. Flame wars, harassment, brigades etc. are going to be the highest you can expect. This is going to force you into high amounts of comment removals and bans. The velocity of action, and anger of your users will mean that you can no longer communicate the rationale for your bans, or maintain transparency. On top of this, you will start to attract groups who will want to use your community for astroturfing, or for targeting. So now you have to deal with the worst kind of adversarial behavior. Getting rid of politics, is just simply better for the product. I will also argue that there should be such product experiments conducted in the economy. We already have a multitude of platforms where we can discuss politics. |
What you need to do is distinguish between politics and partisanship. Political discussion is not only fine but important, as long as it's civil. Partisan signaling, on the other hand, is poison, because it's flamebait and does not lead to reasoned discussion.