[willvarfar]

Hmm, I asked since my mental model of the 'programming community' that I osmosify by reading comments on these kind of websites detects a slight shift on the RMS popularity front over the last year or so. I feel he's coming in from the cold a bit.

I am mostly browsing HN during my european daytime. Lots of people seem to comment on stories during my daytime. Do you mean his detractors are predominantly American? Do you think they have a particular political allegiance too?

[cocotino]

I think people are just tired of criticising him. I personally am against him, but it bores me to discuss the same stuff all over again, especially when it's "meta" as you say and can be deemed off topic.

(Not from the US)

[ajsalminen]

I'm not sure the sort of low-brow comments that have been common deserve to be called "criticising".

[danso]

I was merely referring to the assumption that the majority of HN users are located in the US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298905

Even if things have changed such that only a third of HN users are in the US, that's still a lot of people sleeping. Though I suppose I am implying that more of RMS's detractors are from the US. On one level, it wouldn't surprise me. Even though RMS's reputation is global, most of his writings are in English, and his homepage is currently focused on North-America-centric topics: https://stallman.org/

But I'm going to make a guess that HN is still busiest when America is busiest, judging by the time frequency of submissions currently in the /new section, as compared to what it will look like at 9am east coast time.