Do you have specific examples of content that you believe should be removed but is not?
I'm asking because it's really hard to have a meaningful constructive conversation about these sort of topics without concrete examples, IMHO. I could respond with some generic comments, but they may not apply at all to the examples you have in mind.
For what it's worth, I wrote a little extension to completely hide posts from certain users (and all subthreads to their posts) that I had negative interactions with; from my perspective these people just don't exist on HN. I usually add people to this list after 2 or 3 profoundly negative encounters, or if one encounter is particularly egregious.
I can definitely underscore that HN can be an unfriendly place at times, although in my personal subjective experience I found that the "unpleasantness" is not really isolated to a particular ideology or "side", or even limited to politics (the conversation that made me write this extension in a fit of anger was about devops stuff, after someone was just being a complete ass and I decided I never want to talk to them again).
This is really hard to moderate, because usually it's not "you idiot are you mentally deficient?!" type of stuff – that's easy and obvious, but it's usually more low-key: extremely uncharitable interpretations, wildly off-base straw men, spectacularly off-topic tangents about $pet_peeve, aggressive "I am a singularity of pure rationality, intelligence, and genius" attitudes, put-downs like "after 20 years GIMP still not as good as photoshop, ridiculous", boring and annoying "but akshually" pedantry, conspiratorial nonsense, and stuff like that. Everyone can have a bad day – and that's okay – there's a limit to how "bad" your day can reasonably get, IMHO, and if half your days are bad days....
Even as someone who really tries to keep a cool head about things and typically just "steps away from the computer" if things get too heated it has made my HN experience significantly better.
Maybe I'm just too sensitive; I don't know. I try to be forgiving of people's faults (being forgiving of them is also part of being kind), but I can't control my emotions, so shrug.
> simple things like marking June as pride month/February as Black history month
These seem like meaningless token gestures to be honest. And the US-specific black history month seems a bit inappropriate for an international site like HN, IMHO. I'm not opposed to it or anything (other than being US-specific, as there is already enough US-centrism going on).