We all know HN runs the occasional job ad and promotional piece, but I find it acceptable given the educated target audience. Personally, I also like "Show HN"

We all know HN runs the occasional job ad and promotional piece, but I find it acceptable given the educated target audience. Personally, I also like "Show HN" where a startup CEO/tech lead gets flak, but also has the chance to expose his product. A more imminent concern is that, given the increased news frequency in the last one or two years, many stories don't make it to the home page, and don't get the coverage they deserve. Also, HN is somewhat prone to ring voting, and I guess this is almost impossible to get under control, though it's not too bad IMHO. Both of these issues could be seen as inviting growth hacking or worse: the first one to shadow negative publicity (a trick as old as the soccer world championship); the second one, obviously, by making public reception appear in favour of something, when in reality it's everything but. Ok there's one issue I'm having with HN: too many pieces about machine learning/big data, and stories being predictably offtopic'd by functional programming nerds (but it's par for the course on HN, ycombinator and all).