Well, I've read and upvoted your post, if that works for you? And yeah, I saw it on the new submission page! :D

I browse /new exclusively, and refuse to upvote most of the stuff on there because it's preachy or uninteresting. Maybe it's not that less people are visiting /new, but that a lower ratio of good-to-spammy content is being submitted. On a site with the outreach and notoriety of HN it's not out of the question.

How do you know? Just based on your own submissions or do you have more data points?

Why do you care?