This is HN and I'm sure there are all kinds of filters people have made as add-ons if news like this truly bothers you. Users here are more than likely to make their own as well. You can also always reach out to Dang for feature requests. I'm never going to not want more flexibility in my newsfeed.

>. 66 people almost entirely in 2 counties isn’t exactly a national statistics collection issue

Patient zero starts somewhere. It's not national news per se when a few individuals die of an unidentified disease either.

Meh I don’t need 3rd party plugins, I spent years using them on HN and my iPhone doesn’t have browser plugins.

I don’t care enough anyway I just use HN less and less every year like all the old userbase. The only old usernames I recognize at the top of threads these days are the ones who like the politics stuff (I could list at least 4-5). Just my own nostalgia for a dying small community of thoughtful nerds.

I'm sorry to hear that but it seems that's simply a natural part of the internet. Even 4 Chan was susceptible to this cultural shift and it seems the whole point was the gatekeep as much as possible.

>This isn’t like Reddit where you can unsubscribe from the crazy big politics subreddits or unfollow people on Twitter.

Sure it is. This is the internet, Hacker News is just one website someone could choose not to patronize among countless others.

If you don't want to see US centric conversations, don't patronize American websites like Hacker News and certainly centralized American services like Reddit or X.