> Avoid political threads.

It's not the political threads that are a problem. There seems to be a few companies that you can't contradict in any way on the threads that repeat their mantra. It's usually not even the large ones, so it's very surprising when you get in a discussion that's quite visibly on a bad sideline, you point a technical flaw, and get downvoted into the minimum, just to have your comment go back up by the long tail of people upvoting unfairly greyed comments. (And you only discovers the "culture sponsor" if you go back and read the comments again.)

I imagine that's also unavoidable in a forum where a number of people that breath those mantras through the day frequent. I don't think there's any manipulation going on (except for workplace propaganda), but that does make technical thread political too, and it's probably very disorienting if it's a technical subject you care about.

Anyway, I don't think HN has any penalty for accumulating downvotes. So I don't think there's any improvement to make here.