[dang]

"Outright immediate shutdown of anything ever related to politics" is not at all an accurate description of HN, nor is your "dominate the front page". If you know of a fine supply of deeply interesting stories out there, by all means please submit them.

"Links which are often only tangentially related to hacking" are not only not off-topic here, they're so on-topic as to be celebrated at the very beginning of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your phrasing rather suggests that you want the very sort of flamewars and partisan battles that we're specifically excluding. If so, HN may not be the website you're looking for. Not all internet forums need to be the same, and I don't see why this one shouldn't preserve its mandate.

[throwaway8800]

I do not find your language or "phrasing" to be particularly warm, but I don't think it precludes us having a productive discussion on the matter. Your statement of me "wanting flamewars" is inappropriate if not just disappointing?

Re: shutdown of anything ever related to politics: I do not recall any political posts, specifically posts related to POTUS, in the last 12 months not being steadfastly flagged and summarily disappearing from the front page. This includes threads where the discussion (up to the point it is no longer on the front page) is entirely reasonable and non-combative, aside from the off-topic comments contained within it about how the "political posts do not belong on HN". On the other hand, people can get into a flamewar about the Apple campus and those posts stay.

There is clearly a dogma that exists about "political posts" those ten years of practice and it's clear we disagree. But that's OK. I'll have to, and can, live with not knowing the political opinions and insights on those matters from HN members.