Not sure I understand the troubling part. Non-stock is just plain non-stock. iHub and SI are not generic chat sites. They're market discussion sites. Non-market discussion dilutes them and their value to everyone who uses them. And, yes, advertisers. Advertisers pay more to be shown in the business/finance category and it wouldn't be fair to them to let the site get too diluted.
We don't forbid or even actively discourage non-market discussion taking place. Carrying on those conversations is a huge part of a site becoming less a URL and more a home.
But we do actively make sure that the off-topic stuff stays in the minority and that it's engaged in by people who are really here because of the market-specific focus of the site.
Now that we own SI, I can feel more free to use it as an example, since now it's my problem and when I point fingers, I'm pointing them at a mirror. The political discussion there has become site-consuming. SI's value to advertisers and to other participants has become greatly diluted because there is so much political discussion there. Ameritrade and the like don't want to advertise to people who aren't active in the market (in the hands-on very active way people who use these sites would be expected to be). If a large number of people are present only to discuss politics, they and their content are worthless to business/finance advertisers. And if only 20% of a whole site's content is really about the market, it's not particularly attractive to people who want to discuss stocks either.
A goal of mine is to bring SI's market-specific content ratio up to a level more in line with iHub's. There are many different ways to accomplish that and I'm not sure yet which approach I'll use, and won't be acting too aggressively on it for a while. I'm going to be too busy wearing the programmer and admin hats for a while.
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