That's not to say I don't care about the ongoing crisis (I do!). But I have plenty of other places to read about and discuss it. I don't really want it on HN more than once a week, because it will just drown out everything else.

I get that it's supposedly a tech forum (and that actually it's an advertising & marketing platform) but still, gives a fella the creeps. Especially when major tech figures (Thiel, Musk, everyone in charge of a site exhibiting the usual "engagement algorithm quickly becomes indistinguishable from an intentional right-wing radicalization pipeline and conspiratorial-thinking primer" behavior) are largely responsible for where we're at and are so involved in it, and the rest of the industry's "disruptive" "genius" "mavericks" are cowering like frightened children.

You can still find flagged content on https://news.ycombinator.com/active, which seems like a reasonable compromise. This site shouldn't devolve into discussing every political event -- which usually means American political event because that country has descended into an idiocracy that seems to really like Reality TV-style governments full of imbeciles and plastic faced sociopaths -- but people can still have their release valve as necessary if they seek it out.