It'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'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.

But that doesn'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're neither off-topic nor a recent development, and it's good for HN to be well-stocked with outlier stories.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11090064 for another explanation re keeping HN weird.

> They don't fit with the general theme of the content which is usually posted on HN.

I'm glad HN isn't /r/programming, where there are strict controls on topics. There has always been an 80/20 mix of stories about tech or startups / interesting stories about the world, and I find that works pretty well to hold my interest.

There's a universal nostalgic bias that everything used to be better, so I'm skeptical by default of any claim that something has declined in quality over time. It might be true, just needs some kind of data to be persuasive, rather than personal testimonies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=arm

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=amy8341

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Kechol

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jpatokal

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nkurz

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=MarlonPro

A couple of those people are long standing HN users, with over 1k karma.

These people only submit ignition.co articles:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tekitoeditor

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alma88

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nana7

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=marmn (they have a single link to a medium post alongside their ignition.co articles)

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=tdys

There are plenty of people who only submit from a single domain, and there are some people who post very much more from those single domains than the handful of links these accounts post.

But, again, if you think it's a problem you achieve more by emailing HN ratHer than posting to this thread.

> I mean, just look at the titles. They don't fit with the general theme of the content which is usually posted on HN. This general focus of content on HN has indeed become more muddied and low quality as time has gone on and it approaches Reddit status, but I'm not ready to give it up yet.

I asked some really specific questions and it's frustrating that you just give this non-specific hand-wavey answer. I think you're wrong about the muddied focus, I think you can find articles like this from the site's early days.