> the comments especially are filled with "useful idiots"
Does such a broad brush add to the discussion?
Disagreement can be healthy. I'd say the varied political and philosophical perspectives of HN and Slashdot contributed a lot to changing my worldview. (Hopefully for the better, though we're all still learning.)
I'm simply not at all interested in political topics here and don't care about the (potential) healthy disagreement. Those threads always derail and spiral to opinions and "us vs. them" mentality.
Never have I found a political comment section here that helped me emerge enlightened. I tried for years, eventually gave up and I'm objectively feeling better because of it.
I added a flag for technical and then sort it by hot [1]. I just needed to train a classifier so there's less manual classification needed.
Maybe something like a naive bayes [0] will work? I'm not sure if it's the best dataset. I could make my own dataset by just looking at how many removed comments there are :P
I haven't implemented a classifier before so it may take me a few days. If you'd like to be notified when it's actually working send me an email at info@{the site name}
I have filtered a lot of politics on twitter by blocking prominent politicians and mute words.