These articles are sent lower in the ranking because the mods feel they aren't very constructive
Here are some recent explanations I've written about this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208169
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199248
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21197771
HN has been flooded with China-related stories in the last couple months and most especially the last few days. They have been the dominant topic recently, understandably, as they are some of the leading events in current affairs right now. Important as these stories are, HN's core value being intellectual curiosity requires going easy on repetition—any repetition about anything.
There's a power-law dropoff in curiosity as a thing gets repeated. Other emotions—such as indignation—work the opposite way, so this is an existential issue for this site: the more repetition we have, the more HN's purpose gets drowned out and replaced by something that is inimical to it. This is the explanation of hamandcheese's conundrum upthread, about how a story about the ongoing struggle in Hong Kong, with lots of upvotes, can possibly be ranked lower than something called "The Origin of the Foot Rail". The answer is that indignation is by far the most powerful force on the internet, and as moderators our main job is literally to moderate that, so quieter, odder, less important but more curious stories have a chance to flourish.
If we didn't do that, HN would simply become a political outrage site like most other places. The front page would always be the top 30 outrages in the world, or more likely the top 5 outrages repeated 6 times each. That's the default, so if you want to run a site for intellectual curiosity, you need countervailing mechanisms. Here the countervailing mechanisms are software and moderators. But software+moderators also get many of these calls wrong, and we rely on users to let us know about those cases.
I know that users who feel strongly about these stories still feel like they're under-represented. But it always feels that way about any topic on HN that you feel strongly about. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource here, and there's never enough to go around. Even if your story is the most-covered story on HN, if you feel strongly about it, you will probably feel like it's being unfairly suppressed. As I've said too many times already: even Rust hackers probably feel that way.
If you read about the significant-new-information test in the first link above, the best way to help us with this is to let us know which stories have the most significant new information, relative to which are the follow-ups and copycat pieces. Then we can downweight the latter and help attention focus on what's significant. hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to let us know things; if you try to tell us things in the comments, odds are we won't see it.
By your own logic, if China (god forbid) invades Hong Kong, there would be even more China/tech coverage, and therefore Hacker News will be even less likely to cover it, in favor of stories about ancient Albanian cartography or whatever else is novel and not divisive.
I urge you to reflect more on the way your "downvote stuff we talked about already" interacts with escalating crises, particularly around the topic of online censorship. I know you already reflect a lot!
The point you're making about escalating crises seems to me to be covered by the 'significant new information' test that I've described elsewhere (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). In the case of the current story, we're not suppressing coverage of it or discussion of it; it's the other way around. What is true, though, is that it sometimes takes time to figure out, from the flurry of stories, which are the submissions that best represent new developments. My first impression on this one was "oh, another HKMap.live story"; because there had already been a prominent thread about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159872), it seemed to go in the follow-up bucket. This is a good example of how moderation is guesswork and we often guess wrong. Closer inspection revealed otherwise. User feedback, especially from users who know about the situation, helps us a lot to make better calls. But I think the principle itself is solid.
By the way we came up with the significant-new-information thing after the Snowden avalanche of summer 2013, when users legitimately complained that too many stories on HN's front page were only repeating what had already been said before, rather than reporting anything new. Discussion quality tends to get worse on such stories, too, which makes sense because there isn't new information to sink mind-teeth into. In any case, our goal is not to suppress coverage of these important stories (as anyone who's been reading HN in the last week should know). It's to keep the proportions balanced. Unfortunately for us, one consequence of the proportions being balanced is that nobody's happy with them. C'est le HN.
If there's something I'm still missing, I'd be happy to hear about it and do more reflecting. It will have to be tomorrow though (here) as I'm getting mushy.