The problem was they were not able to stop talking about it. Because they had no other platform than Less Wrong where they could present their ideas to wider audience and try recruiting new people. Also they loved to pretend that the rationalist community as a whole somehow supports their political beliefs, despite the polls showing cca 3% support. Then at some moment Eliezer became tired of being known as "the guy who hosts the neoreactionary website" and publicly disowned them. They moved their politics to their own website called "More Right" (as you see, they still couldn't stop making hints that they are somehow connected with LW), so they finally had some other outlet. (It also didn't help their PR that the known vote-manipulator Eugine was their supporter. I know, that's merely an argument by association, but it doesn't help to keep the debate rational and try avoiding mindkilling, if one side has a member that keeps mass-downvoting everyone who disagrees.)

It seems to me that Viliam's complaint is not that there would be more to talk about, but that more talk would be politicized. [...] I don't know for sure whether it was (I don't think I ever paid that much attention to the politics threads) but here's one way it could have been: suppose LW has few but very vocal neoreactionaries[1] and that most of the non-neoreactionaries are not very interested in talking about neoreaction[2]. If those few neoreactionaries arrange that every political discussion is packed with NRx stuff, then those political discussions will be annoying to everyone else because in order to read the bits they're interested in they have to wade through lots of NRx comments (and perhaps, though here they may have only themselves to blame, lots of anti-NRx responses). [1] I think there is some evidence that this is actually so. [2] This seems likely to be true, but I have no evidence. (I don't mean that most non-NRx people want never to talk about NRx; only that for most the optimal amount of NRx discussion is rather small.) [...] What about when you see a thread that you would want to read, but in which a few people obsessed with things you find uninteresting have posted hundreds of comments you don't want to read? Of course it doesn't need to be neoreactionaries doing this. It could be social-justice types seizing every possible opportunity to point out heteronormative kyriarchal phallogocentric subtexts. It could be people terrified about AI risk turning every discussion of computers doing interesting things into debates about whether We Are All Doomed -- or people skeptical about AI risk complaining incessantly about how LW promotes paranoia about AI risk. It could be Christians proposing Jesus as the answer to every question, or atheists leaping on every case of suffering or successful scientific explanation to remind us that it's evidence against God. Etc., etc., etc. [...] It might be. Or it might be so only in the sense that for an a