[duncanawoods]

> I noticed that with Bill Gates

I suspect that one is probably just natural trend/popularity/fashion at work with the hive mind flocking in the same direction. Gates rebounded from the tech nadir to philanthropist, humanitarian and intelligent sayer of sensible things. A lot easier to like than when he had a foot on all our throats.

Similar effect with GWB. He is rebounding from pariah status and people can't help but warm to the guy's personality now that his crimes are being overshadowed by much larger bogeymen.

[bshimmin]

JWB as in John Wilkes Booth, the guy who assassinated Lincoln? I can't really imagine him having a resurgence in popularity, but I've never fully understood the American psyche, I will admit.

[duncanawoods]

Ah, unfortunate typo corrected :) You've made me worried that might be true too.

[everybodyknows]

GWB boycotted the Republican nominating convention.

[sametmax]

It's possible of course.

Still, he was a hated personality nobody in the IT community would come close to and then suddenly everybody is loving the guy.

Some stuff really don't feel right. My first "oh-oh" moment was when this arrived on the imgur front page (apparently 2015, not 2016 so my timing is off):

http://imgur.com/gallery/YDuoHdr

Everything, form the title to the content and the firsts comment is really weird. After this, I started seeing the Gate foundation work popping everywhere, and supports in comments of major social medias where only suspicion was before.

I did a mission for the Gate foundation 8 years ago in Africa, and at that time nobody speaker about this entity. I had to explain it every time I talked to someone new.

I have a hard time to believe the medias suddenly took a (very one-sided) interest for something that have been here for such a long time for no reason.

Yes, yes, I can be totally wrong. Still I can't help but wonder.

[AQuantized]

I've noticed some occurrences like this as well. For instance, the week before Bill Gates' recent AMA on Reddit, there were a a large number of frontpage posts about him from accounts with little to no karma.

It's probably not the primary factor in opinion on him being drastically reversed, and I doubt he has any personal involvement, but it's possibly one of the tools utilized by his PR team.