Wasn't it already obvious that it's impossible to define 'politics' with any consensus? What makes a 'no politics' idea nice anyway is that it doesn't have to be defined with consensus to work. Whatever multi-dimensional definitions people have still end up converging an awful lot on actual items. Plus as moderators you can always use your own personal judgment, which you don't have to justify, and which is necessary to help drive the site in a direction you want it to go. Otherwise it will drift towards being like every other site. (http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/) Still, I hope for more experiments in the future, and maybe even re-runs. (Going to ever try the 'pending comments' experiment again?)
> Wasn't it already obvious that it's impossible to define 'politics' with any consensus?
Oh yes, but what wasn't possible to foresee was the community reaction, and whether a functioning consensus would develop in practice. It did not.
I don't think moderators have quite the power you describe. We can take that approach, but only if the community supports it overall. That proved not to be the case here in two or three important ways, and we're fine with that.
> I hope for more experiments in the future
I'm glad we're not the only ones who feel that way!
> Going to ever try the 'pending comments' experiment again?
"Pending comments" morphed into what we called "modnesty" for a while and is now known as vouching, and has been probably our biggest single success in terms of introducing new mechanisms.
Thinking it through, I think a happy middle ground would be to have a 'this is political' button that, after a certain threshold, would flag the post as 'political', and would only be visible to those who have 'show_political' enabled in their profile.
