Hacker News Guidelines

Maybe OP can comment on why they submitted this

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

Cute, but I think you read it wrong. It would be very relevant to know why someone wanted to talk about this and how it got to the front. There has to be some context, and I suspect GP is intrigued to know what it is.

The only requirement to submit something to HN is "it's interesting". Random evergreen content with no contemporary relevance gets submitted all the time, hence the (YEAR) rule. My 8 year old GitHub repo which hasn't ever been significantly updated gets submitted to HN atleast once a year: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fminimax...

If other users didn't think this submission about HN rules was interesting, it wouldn't be upvoted.

I think it's more like a question, what prompted the author of the thread to submit the rules? Did they change or something?

I doesn't work like that. What ends up being popular and widely discussed is the stuff on the front page which is heavily curated by dang. So only the stuff that he personally finds interesting/newsworthy will get a chance. I'm not saying this is good or bad but at least let's face facts here. This is not a 100% community driven site; it's very heavily moderated which has up- as well as downsides.