I've always found that attitude of not promoting your own stuff annoying. If you took the time to write it and think about it, you should be proud of it! If you're just spamming, people will see it and vote accordingly.
I'm curious about the submission throttling that you have experienced. You have 4 submissions from the last month (last 30 days) and 9 submissions for the two previous months. What is being throttled?
I don't know, but I rarely can submit new stuff...
When I joined HN I submitted a lot, but suddenly I could not submit for two weeks, then sometimes I can submit twice or three times in a week, and then have to wait two weeks again...
It matters heaps - links submitted by community members with no affiliation to the source have been judged worthy for submission based purely on the content's merit.
Dailydot, extremetech, pcmag, geek, macobserver, betabeat, itworld, bostinno etc have collectively operated dozens of acounts to spam their own stuff, none of which met an actual community member's standards for submitting a story.
Individuals submitting their own blog posts and especially with success are usually so low volume they're not even noticeable unless they overdo it and inevitably get called out for it.
