Sorry to nitpick, but I want to emphasize that we did this as part of an explicitly temporary experiment, to see what we would learn. It's true that we ended it early, but that was because we learned everything we needed in the first couple days. A week turned out to be too long for this kind of thing, especially because there are downsides to doing it (that was one of the things we learned!)
It was both widely criticized and widely supported. The data suggested more HN readers liked it than disliked it.
Now dang, those are alternative facts. [Aieow don't hit me - I'm kidding]
The ban was very welcome imho, we could all use that break following the election. But I personally only liked it because it was temporary. I'd feel very differently had it been permanent or long term.
One downside was that because many people didn't hear the 'temporary' part, the longer we kept it running the more confusion was created about what the permanent policy is. Something like "most but not all politics is off-topic, except for this week when it's temporarily all off-topic" turned out to be too complicated.
Another is that the political flamewarring didn't diminish, but merely shifted to arguing about site policy and the experiment. Indeed, it probably ticked up rather than down.
Another is that many good stories that were clearly on-topic for HN but also had political aspects were excluded, making the front page worse not better.
The bottom line is we can't run an experiment like this without changing the site itself in unintended ways. HN is a complex system that way. 'Do no harm' is at the top of our list, and we learned that there's a big leap in potential harm when you go from a 1-2 day timeframe to a week. So I'm sure we were right to end the experiment early; my internal "are things ok" geiger counter was bleeping like crazy at that point.
It was both widely criticized and widely supported. The data suggested more HN readers liked it than disliked it.