Ask HN: Thoughts and a suggestion concerning off-topic items.

An observation in passing.

Discussions like the one about Barach Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize are valuable, especially when held between intelligent, thinking and rational parties such as are found on Hacker News.

However, I believe it does not belong here. It does not seem to me that it follows the guidelines.

But there's a problem. I strongly believe that the discussion does not belong here, and yet I can provide no alternative fora. Other places more suited to this topic are overrun with the shrieking, thoughtless, knee-jerk reactionaries that I come here to avoid.

I propose a sister site to HN, one where to participate it is required that you have karma earned via the original HN. In that way there is a barrier to entry so that only those with some standing in "the community" (whatever that may be) can join the discussion.

Suggestions, thoughts and ideas welcome.

As a side-note, such "off-topic" discussions often seem to have the number of comments seriously exceed the votes on the submission. Currently http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870921 has 140 comments, but only 67 points. People don't want to up-mod the submission, but they do want to have their say.

I wonder if this is a good predictor. The irony would be if this suggestion garners significantly more comments than votes. It probably will.

ADDED IN EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION:

I'm not proposing any more rules or policies, just that there's somewhere else to go with things like this that are clearly of interest, but not obviously on-topic. There are things I'd like to discuss with HN participants, but don't do so because they're against the guidelines.

Better to have somewhere else to go than to have them summarily killed.