Very depressing. I initially thought the change was going to be a good thing, but it has taken all of 2 days for the site to turn into Reddit. There seems to be much evidence (reddit, digg, slashdot) that social news just doesn't work.
Personally I don't see any problems with that, and in fact great hackers tend to have strong political point of views. To mention a few: Stallman (Free Software), Kapor (civil liberties advocate), and esr (libertarian, second amendment advocate).