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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the tipping point was where the general attitude towards PG and his essays changed. It's tempting to say AI, but I feel it was more like AirBnB era? When people saw how one of YC's golden goose affected the local communities, the rosy color on our glasses inevitably faded.

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Once YC companies started having a negative impact on people and communities. Airbnb and gig worker stuff seems to be the start of it.

His reaction to the 2011 Dropbox password incident was an early concern, IIRC.

Very much so in my recollection

Are you sure the attitude changed generally or did it change more specifically here on Hacker News? Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed.

https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38

Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.

I would hazard a guess that the people attending a YC event (!) to watch Sam Altman (!) talk with Garry Tan (!) would regard Paul Graham well irrespective of how the rest of the world sees him.

> Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed.

I don't think that a change in the composition of HN users is sufficient to explain it. To start with, a lot of the original user base which came over from main Reddit and /r/programming still seems to be active here. And if I had to hazard a guess I'd say that our attitude to pg has indeed shifted.

I think people have now become extremely wary of VC, startup and Silicon Valley because at some point there was a boiling frog shift from helping people and enabling new things to viciously eating anyone not participating.

"at some point the water shifted from cold to hot"

I'm not quite sure which change you are thinking off? This one seems quite well recieved.

OpenAI Airbnb Stripe Coinbase DoorDash Scale AI Dropbox Reddit Instacart GitLab Kalshi Replit Twitch

These are the companies advertised on ycombinator.com. The only one I like is GitLab which I'm neutral about. All other are companies I dislike.

What's wrong with Coinbase? Sure they're in the crypto realm, but it's not like they're actively damaging the ecosystem. Coinbase has been far more reserved than Binance or the n number of crypto exchanges outside the US.

KYC like all CEXs. Pretty much all those companies practice surveillance capitalism. Kraken is also KYC but at least they didn't delist Monero.

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