IMO a culture of curiosity vs blatant promotion is an asset for this board and should be preserved. I counted at least 26 reposts of go-micro. At what frequency should we just consider it a recurring (free) ad?
On the other hand, to a large extent getting traction on HN is a somewhat random process reliant on a few high momentum votes in the early drop. A lot of the stuff we see on the front page is pushed by voting rings. Anyway given this persons hard work on a project and desire for traction, I’d rather they try/learn to market at the expense of a couple of bytes on a DB and a few scanning eyes on /new.
And it seems like this post might be their best yet :)
Although everyone has their blind spots, I certainly thought of your trivial example (pollution of /newest), and thats what I suggested is the "purpose of forum software". That is what "spam" means by the way. Writing a similar-link detection mechanism is trivial and I'm sure will be done, same way reddit has, if it's an issue. Happy to discuss any other consequences you think I'm not thinking through.
In fact the more interesting thing here is how inconsequential this thread is as it certainly wont have any bearing on the link submission culture @ HN. I'd suggest reaching out to the site admins instead of shaming the individual.
/newest is and always has been a shit show of self promotion