Thanks for being concerned about the quality of HN. Here&#x27;s what I&#x27;m pretty sure was going on:<p>It&#x27;s common for boutique publications like this to randomly get posted to HN (often by excellent HN users with long track records). Someone at their office notices the traffic, and they create accounts to start promoting their site here. Obviously that&#x27;s not a good fit for HN. I sometimes email them letting them know that they should stop because our users will consider it spamming—or alternatively, that they should join the community in earnest and post from a diverse set of sources, including their own.<p>But that doesn&#x27;t make the site itself spam. This class of publications often produces articles of general intellectual interest, which is why a user like nkurz would have submitted it in the first place. Such articles are welcome here—they&#x27;re neither off-topic nor a recent development, and it&#x27;s good for HN to be well-stocked with outlier stories.<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11090064" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11090064</a> for another explanation re keeping HN weird.