I'm late to this, but I'm doubtful that that perception is correct. It's true there are fluctuations, as with anything on HN, but the baseline is pretty stable. But the perception that HN has gotten-more-political-lately is about as old as the site itself. In fact, it's so common that about 8 years ago I took a couple hours to track down the history of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869.
Any thoughts about the issues raised up thread? This article being flagged looks to me to be a clear indication of abuse of the HN flagging system. Or do you think there are justifiable reasons why this article shouldn't be linked on HN?
My thoughts are just the usual ones about this: flags of stories like this on HN are a kind of coalition between some flaggers who are agenda-motivated (which is an abuse of flagging) and other flaggers who simply don't want to see repetitive and/or flamebaity material on the site (which is a correct use of flagging, and is not agenda driven because this sort of material comes at us from all angles). When we see flaggers who are consistently doing the first kind of flagging, we take away their flagging privileges.
I don't know, I just searched "Grok" on HN and the 3 most popular stories of the last week have all been flagged killed while having 75+ points and 30+ comments. I can't imagine there are many single world searches that would return that result.
I understand why you gave the general answer you gave rather than addressing this specific example, but I'll just say this story would be a good place to look for those potential "agenda-motivated" flaggers.
