The posts don't seem excessively low quality at first glance - indeed a lot of the submissions get at least some discussion / votes. But it does seem like the kind of content that's simply copy/pasted from maybe other aggregators, or selected from previously submitted HN content.
The account is 12 years old, so I'd expect it would have been booted by the mods at this point if it was undesirable.
It is not automated but I concede that hn might have become an excessive hobby over time (wait until you see the log of articles I don't submit though! so there is also some curation on my side).
It basically is as simple as: I stumble over something interesting, thinking one thing that would be even better than this is a whole discussion about it, submit, crickets or discussion actually happens.
edit: many (most?) submissions (like this one for example [0]) are actually based on something I read on hn so there is some tree traversal and recursion going on as well now that I think of it.
I took a vacation last year and purposely didn't look at anything online apart from checking work email occasionally. It was so beneficial and it made me feel like I was coming back to somewhere I hadn't been in a while.
If you're interested, I'd definitely recommend taking some time to step away from browsing all day.
I thoroughly enjoyed the article and hadn't seen it before. At the end of the day that seems like a good enough reason for it to be posted.
We do have a flagging system for deserving content, and articles will only reach the front page through user upvoting. If you suspect the user is falsely promoting their content using bot upvotes to farm karma you can contact a mod but otherwise I assume tosh is just curating things folks find interesting.
This idea was mentioned (and the article linked) in a comment[0] in another thread earlier today, so I'm not surprised to see it posted. My charitable explanation is that OP saw the comment and thought the article deserved its own post/discussion.
The posts don't seem excessively low quality at first glance - indeed a lot of the submissions get at least some discussion / votes. But it does seem like the kind of content that's simply copy/pasted from maybe other aggregators, or selected from previously submitted HN content.
The account is 12 years old, so I'd expect it would have been booted by the mods at this point if it was undesirable.
tosh, is your posting automated?