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[flagged] Ask HN: How is Trump testing positive for Coronavirus not on the frontpage?
34 points by plessthanpt05 on Oct 2, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 42 comments



> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Yeah, but doesn't the HN community make exceptions for political events of extreme importance, like e.g. election results?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201


Articles about Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning would also be subject to those rules.


> Articles about Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning would also be subject to those rules.

Agreed. This is selective censorship by the HN moderators (which is fine, as it's clearly up to them as to what's deemed important here, but the rules for being flagged need to be more clear in this manner then).


just to be clear, flagged status is not a moderator action, but done by users.


My question wasn't about flagged status, it was about why this story was not on the frontpage (even though several posts about it at the time had tons of up votes and weren't flagged). I'm assuming the mods were preventing those posts from hitting the frontpage.


flagging impacts the ranking, even before a [flagged] tag is shown, so when you complain that the discussion about this is not on the front page but somewhere deep down the ranking, you are complaining about user flags. (And after a discussion got enough comments, which it did, all further submissions are duplicates in addition)


Of course we don't actually know that, but from what little the HN mods have indicated that appears to be at least part of the algorithm.

But moderators do sometimes manually save a thread from being flagged dead, which apparently they chose not to do in this case.


Very little coverage of Assange on TV News to be fair


I was puzzled that we had daily front page Assange Hearing discussions given the exhaustive global coverage the issue has had over the last ten years. Surely this was an instance of using HNs as a soap-box?


A common issue often discussed in those articles is the lack of coverage from news organization like those working for TV news.


Trump saying him and Melania testing positive for the Coronavirus four weeks out from the presidential election is huge news. This story is not about politics (i.e. about a political issue), it is about a political/world leader and his wife.

Edit: So "TV news" covering the newest iPhone release would probably be off-topic too then based on this reasoning, but this seems to reliably hit the front page of HN everytime Apple does so. Apologies for the bad example.


Which is, given that all of them seem to have been submitted on /newest, pretty clear "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." territory (political or not). It's off topic and the comments wouldn't add anything you would not get from your Facebook/Twitter/news site comments section bubble, instead it would just create a mega-thread of political rants and general toxicity.


> Edit: So "TV news" covering the newest iPhone release would probably be off-topic too then based on this reasoning, but this seems to reliably hit the front page of HN everytime Apple does so.

Consider that HN is all about intellectual curiosity. Imagine that the hostname is intellectualcuriosity.ycombinator.com rather than news. Debating product design is more likely to yield interesting thoughts/comments and much less likely to lead to a useless flame war.

The newsworthiness of a submission - which is huge in this case, as you noted - is a relatively minor factor for whether something is a good fit.


HN’s got to be a pretty intellectually barren place if it cannot find anything to drive intellectual curiosity in what is a pretty unprecedented event.

When was the last time a sitting US President contracted a deadly disease with no know cure?

And happened to be within spitting (and therefore contagion) distance of the other Presidential candidate who, if he contracted the disease was also at great risk?

And it’s likely the VP is also at risk.

You have a situation where the President and the VP may be incapacitated. You may have a situation where the presidential candidates for both the major parties may have to drop out of the elections.

And that’s just my immediate thoughts about unprecedented possibilities.


There are two sides to intellectual curiosity at HN: the article itself, and the opinions of the HN commentariat. In this case, I agree that the news itself isn't particularly intellectually gratifying, but this is seismically important news with many potential non-obvious ramifications, and I would be quite interesting in seeing those HN opinions that aren't just "lol die pumpkin".

For comparison, the HN story announcing that Trump was chosen as president-elect had 1800 upvotes and 2200 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201


Currently the subreddit Coronavirus for general COVID news has a post with the information and over 3000 comments. The subreddit COVID-19, dedicated to the science and medicine side of things with tight moderation, has no posting. There is current precedent for keeping it out. Personally, I choose to visit the COVID-19 subreddit for the same reasons I visit HN.


You will see how much longer your bubble will last if the next few months play out wrong.


I'd appreciate if you could skim https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The things that let HN work at this scale are "Be kind. Don't be snarky." and "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

While it's always possible that HN, or some HN readers, or just yours truly are in a bubble, it's not a good-faith interpretation of my comment. Heck, I don't think it's even a neutral interpretation :-) And bubble or not, a one-line "zinger" regresses the conversation.


> This story is not about politics (i.e. about a political issue), it is about a political leader and his wife.

That's worse. Political issues as at least typically have different perspectives to discuss, people-facts do not. This doesn't need to be on the front page.


> Political issues as at least typically have different perspectives to discuss, people-facts do not.

If people-facts do not have different perspectives to discuss, then why would the death of someone (regardless of who they are) be relevant to HN (even though they are routinely on the frontpage)? Or as user "bdcravens" wrote above, then "Articles about Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning would also be subject to those rules", but are also routinely on the frontpage.


Typically, the death is not the thing being discussed, but the death is taken as a point to discuss/share stories about/... the person - and not every death is discussed here. Whereas the current US president already comes up in discussions all the time.


Well I recall the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had Covid-19 and was in hospital and on HN it was flagged. It may have been 'news' but it was against the guidelines. This is no different.

The guidelines probably needs to be changed here then.


> "it is about a political/world leader and his wife"

Boris Johnson's bout with COVID-19 didn't make the HN front page despite being headline news elsewhere. Why would this be different?


It's being discussed on other sites and channels. It's not intellectually gratifying. Besides the market drop, it might not even be major news.


I find it weird how this can't be talked about on HN. This could have profound implications for the country, economy, and upcoming election. The President has been in contact with so many people over the past few days that many senior officials in the government could be infected.


These aren’t the normal political shenanigans, this is legitimate news and should not be filtered.


One consequence of this is that duplicates of the story keep getting posted. The original based on sharing the President's tweet appears to be this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24659207


"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." is probably correct, but, the other question related to that one is: Did they cover it on TV news?


The news broke overnight, when most print deadlines passed. It'll likely appear on the front page in tomorrow's papers, if that's what you're worried about. Otherwise, news organizations worldwide are currently covering it.


Because users keep flagging it. That's really all there is to it.


I felt the same way when Chadwick Boseman died.


Nobody is mentioning that Joe Biden took the day off today. I wonder if he is infected as well.


Does anyone see the bot attack on Trumps Twitter account? That is interesting. They are posting Satanist images with captions in the Aramaic language.

If you work at Twitter you might want to get to work and stop this state sanctioned attack on his account.


Yeah, I saw that. I wanted to ask about it in one of the threads, but they are all being Flagged as off-topic, which is a shame given the magnitude of the story.


It's an abuse of flagging. The biggest story in the world. We can't even talk about it as a community.


In case you didn't see, there is an open thread, its just not on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24659207


It was flagged as well.


Did you get a screenshot? This sounds really weird and I'm curious.




no, and it looks like its all gone. But there were thousands of them an hour ago.




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