HN is more or less moderated on similar guidelines, and the discussions here are better than on most online spaces I've been a part of.

I understand that one cannot draw a line to clearly separate categories from categories, but that doesn't mean that categories don't exist.

As to the definition of these terms, I was only thinking of their "common sense" meaning.

What is the common sense meaning of something being "political"? Do conversations around minimum wage count? What about current LGBT issues?

What is the common sense meaning of bigotry?

"No politics" is not a useful or viable rule. Any time that two humans interact with one another, even indirectly, there are politics involved.

> HN is more or less moderated on similar guidelines

There’s plenty of political discussion on this site (the top 5 includes about ongoing EU legislation). There’s obviously some pretty heavy-handed moderation of it (not that it is inappropriate for this particular community), but no general forum will get very far with such a rule.

HN works partly because it is a single forum about technical topics. It excludes subjects that produce contentious discussion.

Reddit is a general forum. There are subreddits that are moderated heavily and need to be, and those that are barely moderated. There are subreddits for porn and politics because people want those. Reddit replacement needs to support multiple communities and varying moderation.

HN once tried a "no politics week". It was one of the bigger clusterfucks in the history of the site, and the experiment was quickly abandoned.

What is common sense?

Grey lines are hard (impossible?) to enforce.

Not OP but this can be explained.

Porn = Nude Pictures/audio/videos of human beings. People having sex of any type in the form of video/audio/images.

Politics = Discussion of any political ideology. Libeal/Conservative/Country etc etc. I personally disagree with OP here but wanted to define it for you anyway.

Bigoted = judging/not liking people purely based on where they come from, color of their skin, sexual orientation or religion.

Asshole = someone who engages in bad faith with someone and/or calls them names. disagreeing != asshole. But if you add name calling, verbal abuse, direct threats to someone, I would call them as asshole.

Thanks. This is what I mean, perhaps I should have explained better.

I've now just dropped the "no politics" rule, because people seem to get the wrong idea.

This is the crux of the issue. The owner/moderator/single person/relatively small group of people become the arbiters of truth on those questions and that is wrong.

If these are the rules I'm pretty sure the site already lost the battle against reddit

Yep. Just look at Tumblr.