Granted, if you're willing to put someone ignore then that's fine but I've never done that and it's kinda against my principles for some reason.
But can folks really say this board is anything other than worse now than it was a few years back? I think not. The hyperpoliticization ruins political discussions but even on top of that, it overshadows everything else. There is just about nothing but politics on this board, and crazy politics at that. Some people that were interesting posters, whether or not I agreed with them, have either left or post less. And the posters that post more now are usually political fanatics.
There used to be discussion about other stuff. Now, if I have something to post about something other than politics I either don't post it or I post it as an experiment to see if anyone will even respond to a non-political post, which they usually don't. Believe it or not, there are other boards where you can post about something non-political and people will give it some thought and answer you. There's not a lot of thought on this board, about anything.
I'd say that the level of discussion has been lowered except that implies that there **IS** a level of discussion, which there basically is not.
Suppose that for whatever reason, you simply could not talk about politics for, say, a day. Would you really simply not have anything to talk about with anyone? Why must EVERY DISCUSSION be about politics?