I've noticed very, very little politics on HN, even recently. Despite being in a very... tumultuous... political climate, I see close to zero politics. I mean, I haven't seen Trump, or ICE, or the GOP, or the midterms, etc mentioned on the front page at all in months. The only kind of politics we get is the intersection of technology and politics, like Flock. But even that is flagged to hell and back and generally suppressed.

What I see on HN is AI, AI, AI, and then some more AI. Basically nothing else gets any traction, which is frustrating.

I think, in general, the optimism towards tech has degraded a lot in the past couple decades. Which is to be expected, as everyone who sells technology is finding new ways to abuse it every day. Especially for things like AI, it doesn't help that the most optimistic people are basically saying "yeah this is world-ending". The culture-shift isn't unique to hackernews, it's top-down from the entire tech industry, as the tech industry shifts from "cool stuff for nerds" to "tools of mass oppression". That's just sort of what happens when you pump enough money into a sector in our type of economy.