[minimaxir]

> Contrast this to the recent trend of dropping in-line references to project names

Can you give an example? A reference to a project, without a link directly to the project, doesn't meet general definitions of spam.

[denotes]

Sure, a post from this morning:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678369

[gus_massa]

It looks like a single comment [1] and s/he has many unrelated comments [2]. Looks organic. I'd be worried about cases when all the comments have a link to the project in spite it's barely related. I've seen a few, but most of the times they are downvoted or flagged.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tornikeo