Most stories about Brexit, HK, natural disaster, breaking news and "politician X thinks" are already getting flagged regularly. Some stories have an interesting angle though, like voting fraud, a proposed law that affects the tech industry, HK protestors have been using mesh networks.

Even harder to decide if news about Musk, Bezos, Bill Gates, Thiel is relevant or entertainment. Or company X sold to company Y, stock market news, bitcoin movements.

So news about a new school shooter rarely makes it to the frontpage. An article or opinion piece about gun control sometimes does. Same with the current hurricane vs articles about climate change.

2016 election period (felt endless) has been handled alright on HN, I think 2020 election will be alright.

We already have a method to get rid of stories we don't like: the flag link. If a story that you personally find offensive doesn't get flagged -> dead, then perhaps the HNers on average do want to see that kind of thing.

You make a good point that the impending 2020 election is bringing out a lot of this stuff, but you can't effectively separate politics from tech. They each affect each other greatly, and I don't want to have to go digging for stories. I like that everything is in one simple list. If I don't like the tone of a particular article/thread, I can simply not engage, and move on to the next one.

Even if we did do this, reasonable people could (and would!) disagree as to what's tech-focused enough to be on the non-politics page vs. what should be relegated to the politics page. We'd be exchanging one set of annoyances for another, while complicating the site.

And at the end of the day, the mods should/will take care of things when they get out of hand.

Politics tab will make it worse. We will have people coming to HN to engage in politics, which will foul up the discussion on the "main" HN.