It's not even the one-sidedness: HN has historically had either a leftward or a rightward tilt depending on your own politics—that is, everyone on here interacts with people who disagree with them more often than they are used to.

What's changed in the last couple months is that the political discussions used to be both more isolated to specific submissions and more intellectually curious. They got intense, but enough people were interested in actually engaging with their opposition that I've had some of the most enlightening political discussions I've ever seen on here. Now the politics is everywhere, and it's straight flame bait with very little curiosity. A comment like the above would have been instantly flagged to death a few months back as both off topic and flame bait. Now it's what users want to see.

Edit: looks like either a mod or an algorithm did finally downweight this subthread!