Was expecting something a bit more profound.

Yeah me too.

What did people find interesting about this to upvote it to the front page?

It seems only relevant to this persons friends / former colleagues from ~4 years ago.

I started following HN more seriously over the past few days and I keep seeing lots of pointless and irrelevant articles make the front page. I could've sworn it was like this 4-5 years ago.

> Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.[0]

"Turning into Reddit" also includes anything about quality generally decreasing over time. I have been on HN for more than 6 years on this account and another year or two longer on my previous account and while there's certainly an ebb and flow to the overall quality and the focus definitely changes, HN is not any drastically better or worse than it was half a decade ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I agree with this. One question though - is it impossible for HN to degrade? Would we even know if it had?

> "Turning into Reddit" also includes anything about quality generally decreasing over time.

That's not on the page you linked - is that your own interpretation of a one-liner?

It only takes a few votes to get something to the front page. Since there are no real "downvotes" for stories (although there's no consequence for heavy use of "flag"), the best cure is to go through /new and upvote stuff that looks interesting.

That this sort of harassment happens, and the practical measures taken in response, are themselves interesting to me and I think worth thinking and talking about.

+1. Regardless of the intent, and i genuinely feel for this person’s struggle, the post comes off a little narcissistic —- “let me publicly announce why I’m not publicly announcing where I work. I’d like to tell everyone why I want you to respect my privacy and leave me alone.”

Again, not saying that was the author’s intent, but it’s how it came off.

It's clearly there as something they can refer people to. Besides, it's their blog, not a full-page advert in the New York Times.

Same as John Scalzi's "How I use social media" page on his website, really. (and the various variants I've seen on that theme)

Sometimes you need to spell out "hey, these are my personal opinions, not anyone else's - and if you want to know what I meant in a particular post, just ask me for clarification".