The catch-all US politics megathreads as they exist are overtaxing our limited moderation resources and creating ongoing strains in the community. Keeping on top of them is burning out the mods and distracting us from getting work done on other aspects of the site and community that need attention.We’ve experimented with imposing stricter moderation standards on the threads to keep them more manageable, but that separate-rules method has led to its own set of problems: confusion among members about what standards apply where, intra-community conflict over differing expectations, and irritation with mod decisions that feel inconsistent or unexpected.Trying to accommodate the evolving and unusual needs of these threads has meant users and mods establishing or accommodating thread-specific rules and expectations, and mods being torn between trying to keep recurring megathread issues in check and trying to keep moderation in those threads close to baseline site standards, while not being able to really achieve either.We need to move on to something else.So we need to call a halt to the current megathread process. That means ceasing the practice of putting up a new thread every week or two and using that as a daily staging ground for everything happening in US politics until it gets big enough to need a new one. We need to find a different approach to providing as much of what’s been valuable as we reasonably can but in new ways that eat up fewer site resources and better align with the rest of how MetaFilter functions.We’re going to stop having new catch-all US politics posts.Some of the substantial major stories or developments in US politics will make sense as standalone posts. We want folks to rework their expectations back in that direction, toward making topic-specific posts with focused discussions, as was the standard practice up until 2016. Sometimes that may be a couple paragraphs of roundup of links on a complex topic; sometimes that might just be one really good link worth discussing in its own right. More “here is a specific thing worth talking about”, less “here’s the state of everything, go”.Much of the smaller stuff, the constant churn of nonetheless scorn-worthy crap the current US admin et al get up to and the daily twists and turns of political messaging, isn’t going to be good post material and may not have any natural home in what topic-specific threads do exist.Finding the right balance of what’s big enough for a post and how many is too many will be a process. Part of the goal here is to adjust downward the overall weight of US politics discussion on the site, and the moderation attention needed to manage it. It’ll likely involve deleting some posts, and we’ll try to be communicative about where and why we’re drawing a line when that happens. Folks considering a post but not feeling sure about it are welcome to check with the mod team at the contact form for a second opinion ahead of time.We appreciate all the effort people have put into trying to make these threads work, and the worth a lot of people have gotten out of the threads as part of the site the last three years. This would be simpler, and would have happened sooner, if there weren’t that clear value mixed into these complicated things. We’re making this change because we absolutely need to, not because we don’t recognize that value.So one of the things we want to do is find ways to let some of that valuable stuff live on, either elsewhere on the site or by supporting efforts by commenters and readers to create their own self-directed alternatives.In part that means moving discussion of specific aspects of US politics to dedicated threads, so folks who value discussing these events can continue to do so there. Hopefully that’ll allow a little more focus and deep dive on those discussions as well, without having twenty things happening at once in parallel.In part that could mean finding a way to aggregate US political news/developments in some off-site thread or blog, so folks who value having a detailed blotter/timeline of developments in one place can still get that. We’d be happy to help talk out ideas for that, and to find a way to link/highlight it on the site as an ongoing resource for MeFites and general readers.In part that could mean redirecting some of the general social function of those threads to other parts of the site. One of our concerns with the megathreads is that they’ve come a de facto hangout space, but a pretty stressful and angry-making one just by dint of the content; we recognize that for some folks it may be *the* space they prefer to hang out in, but given that we need to make this change regardless we’d like to encourage and support folks in trying to move that back to other parts of the site. That could also mean talking about new ideas for how we can support some of that social energy.We have challenges with politics discussion on MetaFilter that exist independent of the megathread context, and we need to talk about that as well.There are some big recurring issues in how politics discussions get circular or go sideways that we need folks to really be self-aware about and not initiate or perpetuate while discussing stuff on the site. We need folks to be mindful of stuff like:- No treading the same ground again and again, within or across threads.- No attacking or being broadly dismissive of other MeFites for disagreeing with your position.- No telling other people what they think or feel; no mind-reading.- This isn’t a campaign, we’re not holding a vote: don’t treat discussions like you have to argue your preference (or against someone else's) until everybody agrees.Everything is weird and hard now, and it gets people’s blood up, but we need folks to manage that. MetaFilter needs to not be political thunderdome, and it can’t require constant moderation intervention to stop that from happening. Especially as we move further into the primaries and the 2020 election season. I talked about primaries stuff back at the start of the year, in this MetaTalk thread , and basically everything in there still pertains.So: talking about your experiences, your preferences, your goals, the stuff you're reading, the work you’re doing, is fine. Talking about and disagreeing about policy and political history and so on in constructive and respectful ways is fine.Crapping on other people in the conversation, or on other people’s feelings or preferences or stances, is not. Getting in vituperative scraps about whose candidate is worse is not. Bringing an argument back to the thing you’re still unhappy about in the *last* argument is not.We need folks to operate in these discussions like they respect and want to share space with each other and are trying to contribute to a conversation. It can be serious and critical, and it’s inevitably going to involve disagreements, but it needs to not just be another fight about politics every day.And we’re going to need to have folks self-regulate on this stuff. If someone repeatedly can’t we’re going to have to tell them to just skip discussing politics on the site for the foreseeable future, and enforce that with account closures if they can’t manage that. For this stuff not to swallow oversized amounts of moderation time with constant thread monitoring and steering, we’re going to have to use quicker, blunter tools. I’d rather just not have to use those tools at all, but the history of election seasons on MeFi has made it clear that we can’t just ask nicely and hope for the best.all of the above is just about US politics discussions specifically. International politics and discussions of stuff in other countries has never had an oppressively large footprint on the front page and we’re not concerned about trying to reduce the level of any of that. Political posts about non-US countries are fine and welcome; as always, US members should be mindful not to jump in and make those about the US.we’ll be keeping this in place. If you’re posting something about US politics, you should tag your posts with “uspolitics”; if as a reader you want to block posts with that tag from showing up on the front page, you can hide them from there. We’ll continue to put major story posts on the sidebar widget to make them quicker to find.it may make sense to discontinue these at this point. They were intended specifically as megathread spillover. A little bit of riffing is fine in typical MeFi threads, and in threads that aren't 2000 comments long the need to manage comment count isn't so pressing. So aiming to return to that as a normal part of the mix feels appropriate.these were also originally intended as a megathread spillover, but how and what they’re used for has shifted over time. So we need to revisit these and figure out what folks want and expect from them. The recent Hugging Hugs thread has been an experiment in aiming more for a not-politics-centric variation of a venting and support thread and might be the most useful model for such a thing at this point. But we can talk about this some more.folks have proposed many times starting a formal subsite/subsection. Given our resources and other site work that needs doing, this isn’t something we can even really consider right now, so I’ll ask folks to not restart that conversation again in here. For now we need to just try and move back to older MeFi practices on US politics discussion, and see how we’re doing and go from there.This will all be a work in progress, and we might need to make more changes and adjustments as we go. We appreciate everyone bearing with us and understand people are doing their best.If you personally dislike the megathreads, that’s fine, but please keep it kind in here; many people really value them and this change will be a disappointment for a lot of folks, and an adjustment for everybody.I’d also like to ask that we keep this discussion pretty close to the topic of moving forward from retiring the megathreads and toward specific “what’s next” stuff. I recognize there’s a lot of tangents we could get off onto about other site stuff that loosely or indirectly relates to the megathreads and the last three years, but I need folks to help us keep this thread focused so it doesn’t itself eat up more mod and site resources than we have to spare right now. I appreciate your help on this.