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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
If it didn't matter, than why would someone pay thousands of dollars (or more) to a squatter for the .com when the .co (or .whatever) was still available? Maybe it matters less for landing pages for phone apps, but otherwise it seems like it does matter for sites primarily accessed for usage via browser.
If it were (literally) "the complete end of the world", I don't think you'd need to prepare -- I mean, I know this is just semantics, but the end would be just that.
And I get that's not what the article is actually saying, but the title is very clickbaity.