Some of the speculation in this thread [1], originally flagged as hearsay, seems to be confirmed by this article, namely his use of nitrous oxide.
She's pretty credible.
It’s terrible that someone who seemed like a genuinely kind person ended up surrounded by sycophants taking advantage of his wealth and encouraging his drug issues.
"I am going to be blunt," she wrote in the letter, obtained by Forbes. "I need to tell you that I don’t think you are well and in your right mind. I think you are taking too many drugs that cause you to disassociate.
“Jewel reportedly told Hsieh in the note that "people you are surrounding yourself with are either ignorant or willing to be complicit in you killing yourself.
“When you look around and realize that every single person around you is on your payroll, then you are in trouble," Jewel wrote, according to Forbes.
“You are in trouble, Tony.”
She was right.
A lot of us I imagine wanted to be in Tony's position, yet would you still want to be him with how it all went down? His mega-wealth and fame of wealth seem to be his un-doing.
Yes. A lot of people who don't have this type of success like to discredit the lives of those that do in order to protect their self-image. On average, wealth and status increase your quality of life.
I do think there's a lesson to be learned here about the problems that come with wealth and status. To dismiss the net benefits of wealth and status is the wrong lesson.
I was captivated when she described hearing Tony describe his vision for Holocracy, I finally understood what he was aiming for.
I'll never forget at my first friend's funeral when his mother said during the eulogy "My son was a drug addict." It was so heartbreaking but so important to speak the truth and be open about it in order to pay respect to him and call out for action so that more mom's don't have to make that speech.
She did not bury the truth and "wait out of respect", she confronted it head on. If she can do that and do it in a positive way then I think an Internet forum could do it too. The truth is it seems if it weren't for a few of Tony's friends sharing the whole story, the truth may have been buried and many more may have gone down that path.
I was called "lazy" for much of my life. Then I was diagnosed with a genetic disorder and people finally understood I wasn't lazy. I just didn't have the energy other people had.
Everyone knows addiction is extremely hard to quit, yet being an addict remains stigmatizing and the addict is routinely treated in a blamey way for their failure to quit.
Specific outcomes also tend to have a circumstancial component. When a family has a "badly behaving" teenager, they typically blame the teen. But family therapists typically see a misbehaving minor as the presenting problem and wonder what is going on in the social fabric of the individual that is creating this outcome.
None of us entirely has control over our own lives and our own actions. We have some input, but we always have constraints on us.
Explanations that fall inside the Overton Window will be latched onto quickly. This can boil down to victim blaming rather than trying to understand with some compassion how and why things went wrong.
I'm all for personal responsibility, but that really has nothing to do with my point at all.
I don't have any special insight, but FWIW: situations like this are inevitably messy. People want different things (e.g. the social standard about not speaking ill of the dead vs. curiosity to know the truth or share inside information) and they do different things (e.g. use of throwaway accounts to share sensitive true information vs. to post rumors or lies). How all that adds up is impossible to be certain about, and people will strongly disagree. It's intrinsically conflictual and I don't think we can impose simple rules on it. For example: HN is a watercooler site and it's natural for people to wonder what really happened and want to talk about it; and at the same time, that sort of internet thread can run amok and do harm surprisingly quickly.
In my experience, that sort of throwaway account (but there are many sorts—let's not overgeneralize) is usually reporting something true, though perhaps biased. But "usually" is still far from certain. If we'd known that it was likely false we'd have left the comment flagkilled, but in this case it felt likely true, so I unkilled it, but left [flagged] on as a marker of community discontent. To anyone who objects "who the hell are you to make calls about 'feels', 'likely', 'true' or 'false'", I can only completely agree.
p.s. Here's what I replied to a user who emailed about it a few days ago:
"I've unkilled the comment but left it [flagged]. I think that's the right balance.
Posts like that are usually authentic, in my experience. Not to say that people don't make shit up on the internet—they certainly do—but one can usually 'smell' the difference somehow.
Of course the fact that it's true doesn't make it an appropriate comment, but I think [flagged] is enough of a marker to indicate that, and to let people decide for themselves.
It's a tragic story in any case."
If you look at the academic research on rumors, most rumors are apparently fairly accurate. That's why they spread so quickly. E.g.: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009102609001900...
EDIT: and usual hint, the most reliable way to get an answer from dang is emailing him.
As far as I can tell, they were correct but not credible: they did not provide sources in the comment, and it was basically left to be evaluated in a vacuum.
(For context: I did not down vote or flag that comment.)
You just compared an Internet forum to a grieving mother.
Not the right comparison by a longshot.
Allowing a publication run by professional journalists ( they follow a code of ethics) to share news is slightly better than internet forum participants to share their opinions on such a sensitive topic.
But that being said, I agree there are lots of bad ways to handle this sort of thing on public forums (see numerous Reddit failures). But there’s gotta be something better and more positive than to bury the truth.
They were not sharing opinions they were sharing the facts.
And I guarantee you way more people were alerted to the truth in those well-researched and deeply reported articles than ever would have learned from a throwaway account on HN.
If the family had actively tried to halt publication of the articles or if there hadn’t been reporting into the cause of death, I would agree with you. But that isn’t what happened. Moreover, the reporting that did come out, even from the tabloid, added a lot more context and insight into the situation than what the burner account did. And even better, plenty of people were willing to put their name to their words (though you had people who were quoted anonymously too, which isn’t uncommon).
I got downvoted for calling that commenter and his comment gross - and I’ll probably get downvoted for this comment too — but the fact that unsubstantiated gossip happened to be true (which I personally didn’t so much doubt to begin with as much as it was I didn’t trust it without substantiation; my objection was how that information was shared) doesn’t change the other fact that the way it was presented was in poor form.
I’m in complete favor of being open and honest about the fact that people who we admire and respect or hold up as successful can struggle with addiction or mental illness. I think it is incredibly important to lessen the stigma around these areas.
But it is incredibly different for a mother to bravely and honestly declare that her son was an addict at his funeral then it is for a burner account to say “bro blew himself up while he was high on nitrous” (that’s a paraphrase, the original comment wasn’t as blasé but it certainly wasn’t full of either details or compassion). People are going to gossip and speculate on Internet forums, I get it. I’ve also definitely participated in it. But I don’t think it is too much to ask that as a community, HN be held to a higher standard of spreading anonymous gossip, than a place like Twitter or Reddit.
Sorry to be daft ... in the prior HN discussion, which you linked to, people spoke of "nitrous ... and a candle obsession" ... candles are mentioned several times ...
Is that a euphemism ? Or is there some connection in nitrous usage ?
Or is it, simply, he really liked burning literal candles ?