Is Hacker News becoming NYTimes traffic generator site?

It breaks the site guidelines to post insinuations about brigading. Internet users are much too quick to project that (or astroturfing, shilling, etc.) into comments they dislike. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

You're right, of course, that off-topic shallow dismissals are bad comments for HN.

We don't have any content promotion deals with anybody. Our job is to keep the community happy. That's it; though it's harder than it sounds.

Usually when people say an article has "little to do with hacker news", they either mean that they don't personally like it (which is fine, but not relevant at a site level) or that it has nothing to do with technology or startups (but HN's mandate is explicitly to go beyond those: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).