Are all political threads necessarily debates?
This question was brought up several times during the trial period. The short answer is “no”. However, political threads often start in a debatish tone, and very often become debatish quickly. This is especially true during periods when people are more-than-usually passionate about current events (wars, election seasons, etc). One suggestion: think about why you’re posting your message. If you’re angry about something and want to share your outrage, or are trying to prove a point about something, or are trying to persuade people of something, or would reasonably expect that others on the list will respond to your message in one of those ways, you probably shouldn’t post it to chit-chat. Why was the chit-chat list split? Before the split, a lot of debate conversations took place on chat. These conversations had reasonably wide participation, and a lot of people enjoyed them. However, by their nature, these threads tended to be long, and tended to dominate chat traffic. Many people felt
