For one week, starting Monday, all political stories and threads will be off topic. We'll kill them when we see them and ask users to flag them. Then we'll see what happens.
Wouldn't it be much better to simply introduce a flagging system for "toxic" discussions (since clearly they can and do start from other, more mundane subjects, e.g vim/emacs) Then whoever doesn't like them can simply filter them out?
I personally try to be as non-toxic as possible in my remarks, since I feel like that prompts way more useful discussion, but I don't mind/don't care if discussions become toxic (since the original news might still be relevant/interesting, and it's really hard for the comments to be 100% toxic), and I believe at least some people are like me in that regard. I also understand other people might think different too, so a filter could be a nice compromise?
Yes, some stories of core interest to this community have political aspects, but those aren't the kind we're going to kill. The concern here is pure politics: the things that get people flaming about party, ideology, nation, race, and religion. A news story about patents or encryption isn't going to have a problem on HN (though a rant may).
You're right that we can't precisely define politics. But this is nothing new. The site guidelines talk about politics without defining them, and we get by. Moderation has a few core principles and the rest is case-by-case judgment calls.
Re flagging systems: HN has got one, but it has proven insufficient to solve the problem of people hurling rocks and feces at each other when the political drugs take hold.
Re filtering out: it's in HN's DNA that everyone sees the same site. Also, if we quarantine political flamewars in their own section, we still have to maintain that section. Few people who appreciate what HN is really for—stories that gratify intellectual curiosity—would go there, making the degeneration worse. The users who primarily want that kind of a site are not the ones we feel most strongly about serving, and conversely, those users really want a different kind of site than HN. That's fair, but we need to clarify what HN is and isn't. We're trying to avoid scorched earth here.
I appreciate that you don't mind the toxicity so much. That makes sense and part of me feels the same way. But the effects we're concerned with are systemic ones on the community as a whole, and there it's a different matter. The culture has a low and sensitive tolerance for toxicity, not a high one. As the culture degrades, the best people slowly leave, and then not so slowly. Meanwhile their replacements show up with wheelbarrows of rocks and feces. That is how open communities on the internet die, and not letting it happen is our top responsibility.
Don't forget that we're talking about an experiment for one week, just to see what happens. If you have any observations about what happens, please share them with us. We don't have a fixed opinion about this.
That's a misunderstanding of what the policy has been.