[Jeff_Rice]

Note: I'm using myself as an example in this post

Looking at this thread, I noticed it had not input from anyone with a rep less than 4, so I figured I would try to represent that group. It seems to me that the majority of people on chiefdelphi are here as spectators, occasionally dropping a post here and there.

Something such as political discussion often just seems like clutter. Most of the time you aren't going to change anyone's opinion. It usually takes a vocal encounter to do that in my experience.

The reason? Chiefdelphi is on the Internet. It is hard to trust anything on the internet, as your English teachers no doubt will tell you when you are doing a research paper. Though it has a decent reputation, it is made up of people, and people are fallible, and will let their ideal end (changing the opinion of the reader) justify their means.

As such, many people avoid such threads, having informed themselves of issues via more reliable sources than an unrestricted membership forum. Most of them already have an opinion based on the information they have gathered, and reading what others say on that topic probably won't have any effect beyond wasting their time. To these people, the thread in question is just a link taking up space, bumping the one they were interested in down one notch.

To sum that up, to the casual surfer, the political threads are a small annoyance. That annoyance is outweighed by the benefits of good healthy debate experienced by the people who choose to participate in it.