I’m anti-spam myself, but I wouldn’t draw that conclusion from this post. It’s a post that links to a blog post on the YC primary domain site (that is, their company site), and we are on a YC forum hosted on a subdomain of the parent YC domain.

I wouldn’t visit Reddit’s blog and interpret talk about their successes there as indicating that the entire forum(s?) exist for marketing the parent.

And although, the HN forum itself definitely is great marketing, I mean to say that not all the content is marketing for YC.

I also wouldn’t draw that conclusion if someone who worked at Reddit submitted the blog post to a subreddit and it got upvoted there.

Unless it was boosted here, it’s only on the front page because of others voting it up. It’s more likely that it’s the PG effect!