If it's the former, let's hear your thoughts.
Fair point. I wrote the story. My thoughts are in the story. I don't generally submit my own stories, but I genuinely want more people to see it. (There is no traffic incentive or anything.)
Given that HN is more and more the target of subtil PR teams for big players, I wish this kind of thing would be taken more seriously.
It's getting harder and harder to trust anything online, and HN is one of the last place where I get decent content. But the quality is dropping, diluted in well disguised advertisements.
So when a reader says : hum, this is suspicious, instead of downvoting, I wish for the mods to investigate.
If it's genuine, good.
In terms of quality dropping, one thing you can do is submit some high-quality stories or, if you notice one on HN that you think is particularly good, email us (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can put it in the second-chance queue (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and links back from there).
We don't let people use HN solely for promotion. If you saw how many accounts I banned for that last night, you'd not think we don't take that seriously! But it's more complex when it comes to genuinely good articles. Of course some of those have a promotional purpose, but if the article is genuinely good and interesting to the community, no one would win by not having it here. So the quality of the articles comes first.
Since you mention big players—my impression is that big players who create content for HN aren't doing it to acquire customers so much as to attract potential hires. That doesn't have to be a problem, since the best way to do that is to interest people, and that's the same thing that makes HN good. There are subtler issues, though. First, many people don't know that all they need to do is just interest people, and in their efforts to be promotional they end up creating something less interesting, something they imagine will persuade readers but in the end only bores them.
Second, it is a lot of work to repeatedly create interesting content, and big players have resources to spend that no one else has—so there's a rich-get-richer effect. We try to mitigate that by giving higher priority to obscure and personal sources over well-known corporate ones. But there are only so many of those, so there are limits to what we can do.