Do we really need the HN frontpage to look like a mirror of /r/covid19?
Not to mention that, for people who use Facebook / Twitter / etc., our feeds are pretty much jammed full of COVID-19 talk all day long.
I'd kinda like to come here and find a nice story about implementing LISP on Plan-9 running on MIPS using an XFS filesystem, or something else to get my mind off of the virus stuff. It's important, but I don't find that it's so important to warrant thinking about it to the exclusion of everything else.
The front page would be filled with little else if they did not.
The censorship appears to extend even to adjacent news, like CA municipalities adjusting liquor regulations, et c. The story about a letter from the CA governor to the president was censored, as well.
Set up a script to diff the front page every 5 mins to see what I mean.
Their site, their rules. It still sucks, though. :(
Examples:
If you go to the “new” items, a substantial fraction of the posts are about the virus.
With that many posts, it may be that few get enough votes to hit the front page.