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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> because he’s a billionaire

Why is someone being a zillionaire even a variable to judge whether something was interesting or not?

That's exactly the point! This post is a generic, pretty universally-recognized point, written by a billionaire, and is only the length of a handful of tweets.

The only possible criteria that a post this small and with this little substance would get upmodded for is the billionaire bit, and possibly that people are just upmodding 'pg without checking the actual content (I've seen a few people talk about how they use upmodding as a 'read later' function).

I don't even mind that it was, but the comment makes a decent point.

I don't think it's the "billionaire bit", it's celebrity in general, and specifically celebrity in fields that HN readers find interesting.

It is the point. But it isn't the billionaire bit that matters. It's that PG is a celebrity on HN. He wrote this forum and most of the early posts were his blog posts. HN used to be all startups and tech all the time. Before Y-Combinator was successful PG was already a celebrity here who would get auto voted up. Before that it was /. Then Reddit I guess but I missed the golden year for Reddit. There are other HN celebrities PG just happens to be the founder.

This isn't Billionare worship it is celebrity worship. And it's caused because PG has written enough things insightful enough that people can feel their minds changing as they read, that they will reflexively upvote.

I hate seeing anti-wealth rhetoric on HN. If the point is wealth doesn't matter then the criticism ought to be more substantive then 'aye, he's just popular because he's a billionaire'. HN is one of the only places I know of where ambition has been celebrated. I get that startups and the startup culture didn't turn out to be a necessary good thing so there's some cynicism there. But we can do better than demonizing the money, a result, rather than causes.

(Anyway, I think I'd like to join lobste.rs)

>most of the early posts were his blog posts. HN used to be all startups and tech all the time.

To respond just to this part: I don't think either of these things are true. With "past" you can look around the front page in 2007-8. I just did - not very different at all from today. Not many pg essays around - none on most days on the front page. The titles are a lot longer today, seems the main difference!

I shouldn’t have been so hyperbolic. Basically PG was a huge part of HN back then. You’ll see a lot of people writing as if they know him and everything by him or the likes of Steve Blank was voted to the top.

It's the world we are living in nowadays. I subscribed to Seth Godin's newsletter and I receive a post everyday from him. I admire Godin but the quality is shitty.

It is an example of what happens when you feel the urge to say something for the sake of saying it.

And all of this makes me think that maybe somehow there is more randomness to wealth Creation and distribution than we already acknowledge.

Because that's how people often treat it (whether they should or not).

You're implying that since it's not actually a variable (X being rich = X having something interesting to say), it can't function as a variable.

But it very much can. Whether it should or shouldn't be a variable, for many people it functions as one.

The same way people buy music or watch movies of "good looking" actors and musicians, even though being "good looking" is not a variable to judge whether a song/movie is good or not.

So, since this (treating wealth/beauty/fame/etc as a variable as to whether something is interesting) exists, and is often prevalent, it makes sense to wonder when someone listens to somebody else X that is rich/beautiful/famous whether they merely listen to X because he is those things (and not because X has something interesting to say).

There's a good chance that a millionaire came from old money. That doesn't make them inherently interesting. The ones who are self-made, the anomalies in that population, are more likely to be interesting.

Old money are mostly out of the rat race, more distant from the need of self-marketing, and usually with better education and taste (in fact, it's almost proverbial that old money have better taste than the "nouveaux rich").

All kinds of writers, artists, scientists etc were once from that group.

So it's more probable to listen to something interesting from an old money millionaire who inherited wealth, than from a self-made one (which would tire you with self-promotion and gloating about their business acumen, bravado, and hardships they had to overcome).

This text gives me comfort in that the fact that I feel like a noob in many topics should be an encouragement to learn more, rather than give up because the wealthy people are superhuman and I'm not.

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