I've seen an increase, despite the aggressive and partially effective moderation by users (including me), of political content on Hacker News. This content is almost never positive.
If you're someone who likes to do submit these things, please stop. We love HN as our little geek corner and refraining from political content would reduce the negative effects pointed out by the article.
Considering how the tech industry's foundation is made in no small part with government money, support, and approval, I don't know that you can really separate tech from politics. Arpanet, Facebook's funding through In-Q-Tel, SpaceX's entire business, and the ongoing public outrage surrounding Flock cameras and hyperscalers are all stories that lie at the intersection of politics and tech.
I understand your point of view, but where do you draw the line of what is political and what isn't? For a purely programming/technical article, its political dimension is probably tiny to non-existent. For an article about, say, SpaceX's stock valuation? That is intrinsically political, particularly since the CEO is someone who was closely associated with the current US administration. For an article on US-EU tariffs[1]? Even more political.
Stuff that ends up on the home page was not just submitted: it was also upvoted, otherwise you would never see it outside of the news feed (which is full of noise and bad crap anyway. Seriously, go have a look and you’ll see that filtering is actually quite good).
This means that enough of readers here think it is interesting. Those people are neither better or worse qualified than you to decide what should be on the front page.
Also, these stories are very easy to avoid. Just don’t click.