This seems like it might be an automated response but at any rate - give him a break. Mentioning the HN post to people on Twitter hardly translates to "manipulating upvotes" to me.
There is no practical reason to link to a new HN submission rather than the destination of the submission itself other than to obtain upvotes.
The only purpose of linking to /newest is an ages-old voting ring detector evasion technique which doesn't actually work.
How about the discussion around the post? Like this comment section. That's a masssively different value proposition that you only access by linking to HN rather than the article itself.
There were zero comments before mine. (and it's why I explicitly stated "new" threads)