100 times this. There needs to be a coordinated effort to stamp out all political material on HN so we can focus on actual Hacker News and not the Silicon Valley political sphere.

I was away for awhile...came back and was shocked at the level of political bickering and posts that were allowed to stay. A lot of the old members have moved on, it's a different place these days. Such is life.

Forums tend to become fragmented over time because as the number of active users increases, the diversity of the opinions of the community increases. Such increased diversity results in an increase in opposing viewpoints, which drives users away and increases the frequency of political in-fighting.

There are no moderation tools at present which can prevent this sort of in-fighting with blatant censorship.

In the absence of such tools, the only viable solution is a fragmentation of the community. This is most apparent to HN readers with the rise of lobste.rs

I think around the election it was pretty political, and some of the discussion was pretty, uh, heated. It's calmed down again.