The behavior and displays in these ideological flamewars have gotten so much worse over the last year, and the pace of that change seems to be accelerating.
There seems to be a demographic shift happening on HN, away from rational and genuinely interested technologists and business people, and toward college kids who haven't done anything and don't know anything, trying to sound smart and then throwing a temper tantrum whenever anything political comes up.
How a community in aggregate behaves when certain topics are brought up is more than just an isolated event, it's a litmus test for what kind of community it is and the kind of people it is attracting. I think I'm done participating entirely.
I don't think that's accurate. The community isn't that different from how it used to be; it's largely the same people after all. For example, the GP's account is 6 years old.
What's changed is that society is becoming increasingly polarized. HN isn't immune from macro trends.
HN exists for other things: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html