Ask HN: What percentage of HN is simply promotional content?
In your honest opinion.
Getting to the top page is already a systemic flaw that originated from the genesis of this place. The original sin is that the people that run this place have a priority to promote “something” first and foremost.
Getting “to the front page” is a whole other ethical issue, but we have no oversight over the watchmen.
Just trust. So trust requires trust , how much of this place is a giant advertising campaign?
Being really liberal, like counting links to open source projects on GitHub and Meta announcing a new feature on Whatapps but not "another me too blog post meant to build my traffic", I see 50% as "possibly promotional."
I feel like letting spammers run wild(er?) would ruin HN for the spammers themselves, as well as regular readers like you and me. Advertisers and spammers are notoriously sociopathic, however. They just don't care about tragedies of the commons, using up all of a particular resource, externalizing their costs on those being spammed or advertised to, or any other factor. No single raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood, after all.