Many articles posted to HN have a political dimension. We don't exclude them because if we did, the site would become less intellectually interesting. The idea of HN is to optimize for what's intellectually interesting. Moreover, it's impossible to define "political" precisely. Basically everything is political somehow.
On the other hand, unmoderated political discussion soon becomes flamewar. We can't allow that either because if we did, flames would consume the site and destroy the community. And that would also be less intellectually interesting. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
So we allow the topics, but try to prevent the hotter discussions from taking their natural course into, basically, war and rage. We want to avoid the latter not primarily for ethical reasons, but because it leads to informational heat death, which is boring. How to handle this? Lots of ways, but also: badly. We do an uneven job of it and don't know how to do much better. Pretty much any thread that gets into these topics makes me cringe. It's shocking and painful how awful people are to each other when they're sure they're right. Curiosity, incidentally, doesn't come with that certainty.
We try to ensure that articles with political overlap have at least some angle that isn't purely political, and that they contain substantial new information. That provides fiber, if you like, to slow down thought processes. This supports better discussion, or at least not such awful discussion.
Another thing we do is urge people not to post comments that abandon curiosity in order to fight enemies. It's not actually so hard to tell these apart. Any comment with a glimmer of curiosity has a tentative quality that remains open to new information and what others have to say. Why wouldn't it? Curiosity, by listening, may get gratified. This is very different from battle comments, which weaponize language and emotion (on the internet, that means snark) in the service of what the commenter feels is worth fighting for. For curiosity, it's important to remain open; for battle, it's important to fasten your armor, cede nothing, and be closed. Once you've triumphed over evil, maybe you can open up again. Battle may be important, but it's inimical to curiosity. Curiosity is the one thing we're trying to optimize HN for, so we moderate against battle no matter what it's for or against.
Another thing we do is down-regulate indignation however we can. Indignation is the strongest force on the internet, including on HN, and the most hostile to curiosity. Perhaps you think we shouldn't, because indignation has some value? Don't worry; no matter what we do, it will always be the biggest force here. Human nature plus internet equals indignation.
Lastly, another thing we do is ban accounts that use HN primarily for battle. Note that word primarily; it's there because of an empirical observation. Accounts that post curiously about lots of different things and occasionally get into a political argument are fine. Maybe we have to ask them not to cross the line into unkindness—but we wouldn't ban them for that. Accounts that primarily use HN to fight opponents are a different species. The first are net positive even if they occasionally burn some health points. The second are net negative, and not in a small way—in a curiosity-based ecosystem, they're an invasive species. This has turned out to be a fair and at least partially objective distinction that is suitable for moderation. If you watch closely what we do when we ban accounts for political battle, it should be clear that this is the test being applied. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...