LessWrong is focused on rationality and will remain focused on rationality. There's a good deal of side conversation which goes on and this is usually harmless. Nonetheless, if we ask people to stop discussing some other topic instead of rationality, and they go on discussing it anyway, we may enforce this by deleting posts, comments, or comment trees.

This has always been the LW mission, and it's true that some threads are not at all on subject. And then it makes sense to delete them if their net value is even slightly negative, perhaps even if they are merely shown to take too much attention away from rationality topics. Although, I would appreciate it if the first tool used was a request or warning by a moderator to stop discussing something, rather than just deleting it.

People do want to discuss off-topic things, and I at least would like to do it with fellow LW users. (And I prefer forums or mailing lists to IRC.) Perhaps there is enough interest now to establish an offsite, unaffiliated, lightly moderated, Offtopic Discussion forum for LW users. Perhaps such a splitting off would also benefit LW by keeping it more focused on rationality. What do people think?