I disagree. Semi-early HN (I've only been here since 2010) was a lot more political and a lot more technical. When the current heavy moderation regime was added, political topics were intentionally (and for a period openly and explicitly) pushed out. It was after a period with a lot of threads about black people's experiences in tech.

I thought the moderation would chase me away, especially with the reduction in technical content (after a long period of X in javascript threads overwhelming the site.) I was wrong, it's still nice, it's just more mainstream. It's the same stories that are trending on google news, just debated and discussed by smart people with grammar and civility fetishes. That's not actually bad.