
Ask HN: Moratorium on pandemic posts? - slater
I can&#x27;t be the only one who&#x27;s hiding all the stories about the pandemic, right?<p>I think at this point we all understand that it&#x27;s a terrible situation, we should all wash our hands, and working from home has its pros and cons.<p>There&#x27;s about five new &quot;here&#x27;s something i threw together in JS that grabs some covid data from some gov&#x27;t data feed&quot; links every day, and there are multiple threads daily on the topic of &quot;how can we, as hackers, help?&quot; (or a variation thereof).<p>And that&#x27;s not to speak of the tedious click-baity junk of non-primary news sites just parroting whatever news just came out of $govagency$<p>Yay&#x2F;Nay?
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JMTQp8lwXL
Better to allow the posts, and those who wish to discuss them, then not allow
them at all to save a few folks from clicking 'Hide'. Usually it is obvious
from the post title if it's COVID related or not. Having to read the title
isn't causing great injury to you.

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zw123456
Are we sure that the economic damage of the shutdown of the world economy out
weighs the heath risks of the virus. Are we in group think here? A major
recession/depression means a lot of people go hungry, lose access to medical
care etc. Does anyone know of studies or research that looks at the health
impacts of a shutdown vs. the health risk of the virus ? Just asking
questions.

Is the real question here being hidden ? I am asking a legitimate question
that never gets an answer.. that tells me something.

~~~
TYPE-ERROR
It's not being hidden, but it's not being discussed in the open because it
seems to put people's lives second to wealth.

This is a novel situation. I'm not sure anybody can make a good prediction
about the public health and the economic consequence of this pandemic.
Society's answer to this crisis could well result in minor recession followed
by a boom of economic progress, fruit of innovations made in response to it.

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ak39
No.

For two reasons:

1\. The frequency and number of posts is data in itself about the overall
sentiments of this pandemic not only in the general public but also within our
smaller subset of technologists. (I want to know whether it is hot or not
anymore.)

2\. The voting system on HN is sufficient to move the quality submissions
relating to COVID-19 to the top. I have faith in its ability to sift the good
ones from bad ones. (Yet! Looks at Dan!)

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DoreenMichele
I occasionally leave my opinion that "this particular piece is crap" in
essence and I'm actively looking for non-COVID stories to read and comment on.
I think helping bad COVID stories sink faster and helping support some
diversity of subject matter is a good thing.

But I think a moratorium is too much. Better to try to actively support some
variety and actively try to help people sort the wheat from the chafe.

/2 cents

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ggm
Is a "useful level of indirection" not perhaps possible?

news.ycombinator.com/covid19/normal-URL-behaviour

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3minus1
I like 'em

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auslegung
Nay. This is possibly the most economically damaging, socially isolating,
fear-inducing, death-causing event in generations, and will be for generations
to come. It will be the most discussed topic around the world for all of 2020,
and will continue to shape our lives, policies, regulations, laws, and social
norms for decades. Ignore it if you want, but asking everyone else to join in
your self-induced blindness is unnecessary.

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dang
Please don't attack fellow users like that. During economically damaging,
socially isolating, fear-inducing, death-causing events, we need to take more
care for each other, not less. Note this site guideline:

" _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone
says, not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize. Assume good faith._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
auslegung
What about my post was attacking? Also, may I quote you, at you?

> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone
> says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Why wouldn't you assume good faith that when I said "asking everyone else to
join in your self-induced blindness is unnecessary" I meant exactly what I
said, without any rancor, malice, ill-will, etc? You may read my original
reply with an angry tone of voice, a pleasant one, a curious one, a vindictive
one, etc. But I have to believe, based on your comment, that you did not
assume good faith with me but rather read my comment with something less than
a pleasant tone of voice. Am I wrong?

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dang
"Ignore it if you want, but asking everyone else to join in your self-induced
blindness" contains at least three personal slights, of escalating intensity.

For sure it's ok to quote the plausibility guideline at me. We all need to
work at it, and it's not easy. I do find it implausible to read your sentence
(the one I just quoted) as free of any rancor etc. If you tell me you wrote it
in that spirit, I believe you, but intent doesn't communicate itself on the
internet. Most of the time, when people post such things, they are flaming
somebody—so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20burden%20disambiguate&sort=byDate&type=comment)

