Wow, just curious about the implementation. Do you use some sort of heuristics in determining political posts or excessively complaining posts?

The main one is number of flags. When anything gets over a certain number of flags, it shows up on a list that admins see. They decide either to kill it, mark it as political or whatever, or do nothing.

I'd imagine the heuristics mechanism was biologically evolved ... ;)

However, you also have to take into account that Matt didn't quit just based on the quality of the articles posted, but also the decreasing quality of discussion.

This comment thread is a perfect example of fanboy pile-on voting against a well-reasoned but unpopular point of view : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1888239.

Don't you think turning off HN (literally) for a few hours every now and then will help? Sure, it won't be convenient and some people will complain but it's still worth a shot. It will at least improve the world's productivity by a few % points. The next Google might be born.

I've often thought about that, actually. I think I proposed the idea once in a comment thread. But most users seemed to be against it.