Hacker News Reader

Comment by wut42 | Hacker News Reader

You are mostly right. It was all born on misunderstanding, Lee's escalated it too much, then went to interfere and create this situation.

But the actions he's been doing on it after that ? It speaks by himself, and he's the only one responsible.

View on HN

What does he get out of all of this. I can't understand his motive?

I try to, but it's really hard. The initial "take-over" was because he felt entitled to do so (feeling an agression (that mostly didn't happen and was a misunderstanding) on his property). But what he's been doing ever since is weird, and could also make think of another motive for the original actions as well...

I followed a dude on Twitter. He was semi famous and a big proponent of free speech. One day he posted some steaks he cooked. Some people started responding with steak cooking tips. He responded by banning everyone of of them. This has the same feel but on a larger scale.

I had a boss that used to get really angry at people when they wished him happy birthday. Same feeling.

I hate puzzles like this, they get stuck in my head. I'll be thinking about this for weeks.

this one at least seems fairly traceable (this is from the perspective of an outsider, correct me if any of this is wrong):

-christel sells something that wasn't really hers to sell, which she technically had some degree of ownership over, due to a former non profit being dissolved to save costs.

-the guy now thinks he owns it, everyone else thinks he just sponsored some conferences in exchange for a logo placement

-years later, the guy asks for a logo to be swapped out for another

-this causes confusion and christel just resigns and disappears, the situation now no longer able to be kept under wraps by her (I'm ascribing motivations here)

-the new leadership takes over with christel being gone, and doesn't understand why the guy who ran a few conferences has control over the freenode domain, so seeks to remove him from it (without hostile intent, just as part of regular governance)

-the guy thinks he's being usurped, potentially unaware that no one really knows that he bought this domain and "freenode" from christel (freenode servers etc were not supplied by him but rather donated by other third parties)

-he seeks to reinforce his ownership of freenode

-fallout ensues

This is mostly what happened, yeah. Gathered a lot of information on this since a week or so (I am an outsider too).

Logic and emotions are almost diametrically opposed, as far as our intellectual understanding of them can be concerned.

My read of the situation is that Ariadne was more or less correct; running Freenode was a childhood dream for Andrew, he mistakenly believed he could get there with money and strongarming, the community rejected him and refused to provide validation, and now he's increasingly trying to keep the community from leaving him by force.

This could explain the overall situation pretty well. Could be more or less some shortcuts, but in the end, it matches.

Ah that makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

I mean, stupidity, I assume. I think he’s rather out of his depth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com