The Intercom team writes about product design, product management and running a software company, with posts on design and mobile.
HN links it for posts like the Orange Juice Test and the Cards article, which commenters cite when discussing design practice.
That's a bummer, I was thinking this was more of a game to recognize design little details in widespread applications (Facebook, iMessage, iOS...) - so in that view the "subjective opinions" were not subjective but how those apps are doing design choices. Not saying they are good because, for example with the 'Skip' button in the Facebook example, people can't tell if that's actually a clickable button from the first sight, which is a terrible design in usability terms. Not sure who came with that "designing secondary buttons as if they were not buttons" thing, but the first time I saw them was with Android Lollipop and their then-new "material design".
Putting what you're saying in perspective only tells that even now employers are helping to the dribbblisation of design[0][1][2] - and helping developers hate us designers even more.
[0] https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-dribbblisation-of-design/
[1] https://medium.com/intercom-inside/the-dribbblisation-of-design-406422ccb026
[2] https://graphically.io/blog/the-dribbblisation-of-design/
This mirrors my experience as a UX designer coming from the usability side.
Many graphic design refugees are interested in learning about usability, user research, heuristics, Fitts' Law, GOMS/KLM, etc. But it takes time and energy. I've found that some small companies with no established UX team start out gravitating to shiny portfolio examples and end up putting visual design (VX) folks in charge of interaction design which sometimes goes poorly e.g. https://medium.com/intercom-inside/the-dribbblisation-of-design-406422ccb026
This is exactly what Paddy Adams was talking about with Cards, and I agree strongly with both of you: https://medium.com/intercom-inside/why-cards-are-the-future-of-the-web-d3f6ce8b843a
Jerry Weinberg had the Orange Juice test which always struck me as a practical approach to all requests.
https://medium.com/intercom-inside/the-orange-juice-test-c9033fbb7117