I don't think people consider the entire site spam. It's user-created content after all. But if 99% on a site is spam and your articles are not, you may want to consider posting them somewhere else, ideally your own blog, to avoid suffering from the site's bad reputation.

The same goes for medium.com. There are good articles on Medium, but 95% of it is low-quality or spam, so I generally avoid these links or come in with the expectation that an article is likely spam.

It's unfortunate because of all the platforms it is one that gets the most human interaction in terms of real thoughtful humans willing to discuss things. I've tried a lot of platforms and dev.to is the best as writer from this perspective. Medium has better stats but that is about it.

It's super unfortunate that the best place to write is also the place most blocked. HN isn't the only one. Reddit also by default blocks dev.to. There are plenty of low quality articles on both sides.

I think the moral of the story is that there is too much garbage out there and a computer algorithm is incapable of making the distinction. HN is fine risking being behind the curve if it saves it readers from wading through it. That's a fine tradeoff but means it leaves things on the table.