[petite]

I think more that the submission guidelines are a catch-all for obvious stories that the entire community wants to avoid. These are stories that appear on large community sites, regardless of whether the core community has interest in them, and only appear to increase the demographic of the website.

But I don't think Hacker News works the same way. Anyone is allowed to submit a story, and depending on the community interest, the story gets posted to the front page. This ensures that the stories of most interest to the community are most viewable to the community. So the way I understand your criticism, it seems more to be a critique on the entire community (or at least the ones who vote), rather than a critique on the poster not following the rules.

"WhyIsThisOnHN" commented on articles about differing ways to look at literature, a painter who creates photorealistic paintings, a question posed to the HN community (this article), and one on the cause of death in cyclists. None of these articles strike me as something that merely exists to draw in eyeballs, but rather portray the varying interests of a group of highly motivated and intelligent people. Those are the types of articles I come here to read. If I wanted to read about computers and code all day, there are websites for that. If I wanted to read about startups all day, again, there are startup centric sites. I am interested in what people of like mind find interesting, but perhaps do not have the chance to expose myself to due to time constraints, and I think that this is partly responsible for the appeal of HN over other aggregate sites.

note - sorry for the off-topic comment, this is just something that has been on my mind, and possibly exasperated by the WhyIsThisOnHN username