Since you mention politics in particular, it would be close to impossible to define an adequate boundary of what constitutes politics, and what is tech / lifestyle / entertainment; all 3 categories I think could also describe the thread on /r/antiwork.
And i dont mind politics at all. When it degrades it's ugly. But most users seem to be willing to keep some open neutrality & interest in engaging one another, even when they disagree. I like tvis open society we have here & would not seek to change it. Itcs sad to hear someone insisting tbeir baised shape how everyone else acts & what we discuss.
If I post an article from 538 it gets flagged.
Every day people flag stupid anti-woke articles. Every day people flag stupid SJW articles. Those people are discriminated against equally. They agree it is unfair and they both post articles complaining that a secretive cabal is flagging their articles, downvoting their comments, hurting their feelings, etc. Those articles get flagged.
Build up your karma, submit interesting articles, and soon you will be empowered to flag for yourself. You won't be able to strike down an article yourself but together with a just a few other users you can.
It didn't even last for a few days and made things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785191
In 2012, I wondered if HN could go 2 months as a meta comment on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3807875 I'm totally not still at least a little exasperated by the few downvotes at the time and the subsequent changes in the 10 years since.
Point is, it's not going to happen. Try to avoid looking at it (I don't even know what antiwork thread you're talking about), and if you look at it try to avoid engaging. If you do engage, do so with a persistent username to resist a throwaway troll (and if you get banned reflect on how you're making things worse) and also maybe things will be a bit better if you try to only engage from a history-looking perspective or even a meta perspective and not per se an arguing perspective.
I once collected a bunch of HN names of people I like reading and put them into some site that tried to intermingle them, sorta like twitter, but I think the site died and anyway without context it's hard to read all at once like a feed and there are other issues. Still, something like your own self-curated list of accounts to be your entry points to either comment trees or whole posts would probably be helpful to avoid seeing stuff you hate engaging in.
Would be nice if it was still libertarian 90s silicon valley (where politics matters a lot less, because you don't want to control anything), but that time is gone.
It ran up against the people who very much want to control things and turned out not to have a plan for that. The dot com boom attracted attention.
> but that time is gone.
And I think the proponents of that era have moved on as well. The big takeaway for me was that Meatspace Rules Everything Around Me and I ignore it at my peril.