The way this sounds is that you are more concerned about politics as in people who take party positions and may feel excluded as a group when the majority of the community takes a different position. This is a slightly different issue i.e. party politics, and I think it is fine/a good thing, but it is also important to distinguish the two. This should essentially be under the same umbrella as personal attacks, as they are essentially the same thing.
I'd rather see HN go politics-free forever. Political discussions do not enjoy the same level of objectivity that technical and business discussions do. Frankly, it may be impossible to expect objectivity within political discussion because our political feelings are so deeply-held and tied to our individual upbringings, culture, and locale.
Unless HN can figure out how to give fair treatment to minority opinions, it's best to exclude these discussions entirely.
I'm all for flagging uncivilized discussions, but eliminating discussions outright because they might make people feel uncomfortable or might turn uncivil seems like we are missing a really important piece to the news we discuss here.
Minority opinions are never going to have "fair treatment" by the majority. I've been down voted several times for my opinions and I'll take it again just to be able to have the discussion here.
What about Uber's woker policies? Facebook censorship/curation? Data privacy?
Hiring and firing policies in tech companies?
How to manage rogue IoT devices? ICANN domain policy?
This is just a sample of topics that feel pretty "Hacker News". They're all political (or at least have strong political angles), and they're all pretty popular topics of conversation here.
Now I've felt the moderation here has worked in good faith, and is likely trying to reduce flamewars here. But I'm a bit worried that the things that get marked political will mainly be around discrimination issues.
And considering the amount of SV "leadership"(scare quotes but you get the idea) on Hacker News, this is a _very_ effective forum to talk about the difficulties of certain people to get work, get funding. Talking about it here can jumpstart more ways of tackling these issues, and thinking about what the community as a whole wants to do
Unless grounded and significant structured, discussion about discrimination aren't going to bring any new ways of addressing things. What it commonly do is just expanding the battlefield and pushing people further apart. Even between those that agree on the goal, people can and do still disagree on how to reach it. I have described it in the past as comparing left and right politics, with both side wanting prosperity and liberty. Each side has fundamental different views and values for how that will be accomplished, so the discussion circles around the disagreement rather than the agreements.
To perhaps abuse an analogy, when a neighborhood gets well known for arson, people will move away. At some point it may make sense to forbid certain types of structures in the neighborhood to see if it reduces the instances of arson. (okay, that's admittedly pretty tortured :)
It's a trade off, and while I'd like the world to be perfect and people talk about everything calmly and with respect, empirically this is very much not the case for certain topics. A limited test (detox week) makes sense to me. And it might not work, which is why it's a test.