It's inconsistent but I wouldn't necessarily call that selective, because randomness plays a major role.

It's not possible for moderation to be consistent because we don't read, or even see, most of what gets posted here. There's far too much.

There are other, less obvious factors affecting this too. Here's a post where I went into this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306.

Btw, regarding this:

> insignificant iterations of overly hyped tech products for years now

HN's moderation system downweights those even more regularly than we downweight (some) political posts. Here's an explanation from a few years ago, which caused quite a stir if I remember correctly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428 (May 2020).

In both cases—incremental product releases on the one hand, and political news on the other—some posts still make it through through to the front page, and in both cases the users who want more of that category feel like it's unduly suppressed, while users who want less of that category feel like HN is overrun with it.