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Comment by latkin | Hacker News Reader

> He is not fucking around for clicks in any shallow sense.

He is undeniably "fucking around for clicks." When you don't want clicks, you don't cross-post to YouTube, BlueSky, LinkedIn, your blog, etc. Clearly a lot of effort went into making this announcement social media friendly and click-worthy. He has analytics on his blog to track how many clicks he gets.

Whether it's in a "shallow sense" or not is subjective and there's no way to really argue against that. Do I think he's karma-obsessed and drooling over engagement dashboards? No. And maybe that's what you mean.

But you have to be willfully naive to deny the irony in deploying numerous completely unnecessary layers of tech, over numerous social media channels, to let everyone know that you no longer want tech and social media in your life.

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>He is undeniably "fucking around for clicks." When you don't want clicks, you don't cross-post to YouTube, BlueSky, LinkedIn, your blog, etc.

Is he? I realize your comment is 2 hours old at the time of my response, but go to his webpage now, and click through to Bluesky. Then do LinkedIn. Then Twitter. Those accounts all appear to have been nuked from orbit. The argument that someone's "fucking around for clicks" falls apart when there's nothing to click on.

If someone was a frequent blogger with a big following, I won't fault them all that much for saying, "I'm out," to their audience. It's easier to answer, "Where'd you go?" in a public fashion right up front than it is to, potentially, field that question in private more than you'd like to after you bail.

Indeed, it appears that he's now deleted his social profiles. Good on him! That is exactly the right thing to do at this point to follow through, so kudos to him.

TFA was published a day ago, the corresponding YT video was published 3 months ago. He had cross posted the blog (not sure about the YT) across multiple social media channels in that time, up until an hour ago (or thereabouts) when he finally deleted his socials. That was the state of things when I wrote my original comments and follow-ups. So I stand by the assertion that he was clearly interested in promoting the content, at least initially.

Unfortunately I can't edit any of those comments any longer.

I don't really see the problem of proliferating a message one finds sufficiently important to as many places as one has reach.

It's a bit performative to say "x is my last day" when there is a ton of evidence to the contrary.

I agree with you, it's more that... it is performative in itself.

If you are somewhat of a public figure and working in a leadership role at a company, I think it's more sensible to put out a widely-seen public announcement about where you are going next, than to just disappear.

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