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 t

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.