If you browse new enough you’ll see vaguely topical spam. Every once in a while you see completely off topic spam (ie “$$$ Learn to sell home made soap $$$”).
It’s way too easy to sign up and submit for spam to not be an issue. Of course there is a blacklist of some sort.
Don't forget to subscribe to their newsletter spammed in the "article" they linked where the mention over and over about their startup they are working on.
I don't like the line of reasoning because "spam abuse" is the boogeyman of the technical internet. You can justify requiring real life credentials to "combat spam", and that is exactly what Meta does and how they spin the PR. Twitter/X just rate limited the top 5 largest site under "spam/scraping concerns".
Spam is annoying but it is like piracy: short of moderating every single piece of user submitted content, it is a game of cat and mouse, and the mouse has infinite time and nigh infinite resources. I don't think sacrificing honesty is a good compromise for this game.
IMO, 'dang & Co does a pretty good job at maintaining hygiene here on HN.
“You can justify requiring real life credentials to ‘combat spam’”
Yes, some would indeed make such an argument. But that’s not what we’re discussing here. We’re talking about a list of banned domains. That’s very far from requiring ID for the members of HN.
Of course HN is a target for spam.
It’s expected that the list isn’t public and 'dang has explained why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130234
Nothing surprising here really.