Why is hacker news censoring covid-19 articles? This article just disappeared from the front page despite having more upvotes than most articles on the first page after being submitted an hour ago. Another covid-19 article over the weekend disappeared from the front page also.
I'm not aware of HN itself actively "censoring" anything, as long as I've been here. If articles are disappearing from the front page, then it's likely due to them being flagged by users.
I'll also note that I use an alternate front-end for HN - hckrnews - which by default sorts by time, so the only way I'm ever aware of this sort of complaint is when someone brings it up in the comments.
As for this topic in particular, there has been a lot of coverage about COVID-19/2019-nCoV recently, but there hasn't been a lot of new information. I suspect people are flagging the topic because they're getting their regular updates on it from other communities and want HN to remain a place where topics that are of particular and specific interest are posted. Once I realized that's how the majority of the community sees it, I stopped thinking of the rise and fall of topics here as being based on whether or not they are "newsworthy" and it started making a lot more sense.
I don't know exactly, but IMHO this weekend it has raised itself up to the point that the tech industry really needs to start paying attention to it on a number of levels. The company I work for has a number of significant international offices, and I think the odds of at least one of them being significantly impacted at some point in the next 2-3 months has to be at least 25%. It isn't just the virus itself, or even necessarily primarily the virus, but also the measures the local government enforces. A lot of us engineers have a relatively easy "work from home" option, but not everyone is a programmer.
You also have localized concerns, like, at what point are all the people ordering from Amazon going to stop because they're afraid of getting the virus shipped to them? What is Amazon doing about their worker's health, especially in light of the rather persistent rumors this can spread while asymptomatic? On the one hand, I see people claiming that the virus can't survive being shipped very well and on the other hand we have Amazon striving to ship faster and faster, to say nothing of the actual delivery person.
Whether we like it or not, this is rapidly becoming "tech industry" news too. Unless we are very lucky, by the end of this week, I suspect that's going to be obvious to everyone.
As I've said a few times about prep, even if you don't get the virus or your area never has to be locked down, you ought to be doing prep work anyhow. If it isn't COVID-19, it'll be a quake, or a really bad normal flu season, or any number of other things. You make society more resilient and better able to deal with "true" emergencies when you've prepped enough to take care of yourself and not drain vital social resources at the worst time. You don't usually get lucky and have this kind of warning about oncoming issues. Prepping for a pandemic isn't identical to all the other things you may actually experience, but there's a lot of overlap.
