You guys appear to have a whole posse of accounts promoting your stuff in dubious ways on HN. I'm not sure exactly where the line is between normal sharing of information and abuse, but wherever it is, you're on the wrong side.
HN threads are for conversations, not commercials. There's nothing wrong with linking to one's own work when it comes up naturally in a genuine conversation. Abusing conversation for promotional purposes, though, is another matter. When accounts do that repeatedly, we ban them as well as the site they're promoting.
HN users flagged your comment. Open-source or not is a red herring—the issue is illegitimate promotional tactics. (I've replaced "commercial" with "promotional" above to make this clearer.)
I'm surprised that you're not sure what I mean. From examples that users complaining about comment spam have emailed us, as well as the data I'm looking at, there is a longstanding pattern of abusing HN threads, including in outright deceptive ways: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8637324.
We have a contract with HN users: they're not allowed to accuse each other of astroturfing, and we promise to crack down on actual astroturfing when we see evidence of it. I'm seeing evidence.
I feel bad for taking this thread further off-topic, but it's important for users to see us upholding our end of that bargain. If you want to discuss this further, please email hn@ycombinator.com.
