This is a good step, but I think just the increase in overly political postings vs. tech oriented content has been a major contributor to the negativity.
For better or worse, many "tech oriented" topics these days are politics.
Many people in the engineering and related fields often wish to ignore the political discussions and stay focused on the technology. This is an understandable desire. Technology is is often complicated leading to a general hatred of having to context switch into other topics. Experience teaches that it is a usually easier to achieve reliable results with technology you can logically prove or verify that with emotional, capricious, untrustworthy humans.
Unfortunately, technology brought us products such as "smart TV" that bring up serious questions about surveillance and evidence, cheap network clients that allow ubiquitous access to incredible amounts of knowledge that is certain to affect education and testing/grading, and self-driving cars that will require a serious refactoring of many aspects of society.
More importantly, I think it is important to remember that escaping the political side of anything simply cedes any disagreement to those that are addressing politics. I think JMS said it best in the closing lines of Babylon 5: "we had to create the future, or others will do it for us". Technology experts need to address these things, or important decisions will be left to those that are not qualified.
Now, that said, neither technology nor political discussions excuse rudeness, personal attacks, or generally disruptive behavior.
For sure. I am guilty of it too. It's rather counterproductive (myself included) to get sucked into various "America starts wars" or global warming discussions. Healthy political debate is great but unless it's extremely relevant to tech/startups, this isn't the place. Plenty of space on Reddit for heated religion or politics debates.
I am not so egotistical as to think this policy change was because of me, but I certainly, at times contributed to the fray, especially in political oriented threads. In terms of Show HN, I really think that constructive criticism is helpful, but also encouragement and praise is equally important. We should be rooting for our HN community, not trying to snipe or tear people down. The rest of the world is already really good at that!
I welcome the reminder to seek the best from each other and build each other up as a good mentor would do. No smoke-up-ass platitudes, but certainly we should think of ourselves as part of a huge team out to change the world and do something amazing.
