[dang]

This is a better article than the typical personality piece or character assassination, but the thread here shows the problem with these things: there just isn't that much to discuss. Once a public figure or celebrity has grown beyond a certain size—I don't know what the threshold is, but it's lower than 1 Zuckerberg—they become a generic theme, and people mostly just repeat their pre-existing feelings about them, as well as practicing the social rituals that humans do on such occasions.

Public figures of this sort become cartoon characters [1]. The way we relate to them reminds me of how the Greeks used to talk about their gods, and at times also of the feces-hurling behavior in other primates. I don't mean that dismissively, I mean it almost literally (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23406290). These discussions are fascinating because they're so repetitive and so consistent. But their content is not interesting, because they're not about content. They're deep social behavior.

It's always been a principle on HN to emphasize content over personalities [2], and that principle has served well over the years. I think I've learned something about why: it's because intellectual curiosity and social curiosity are different things. Social curiosity is what lies behind gossip, fascination with celebrities, and so on—the lives of others, if it's ok to adapt that phrase. Intellectual curiosity has to do with expanding one's view of the world. Both are deeply human, but HN is a site specifically for intellectual curiosity. That explains why articles and threads like this invariably miss the bullseye here.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - I recalled using this phrase further back, too, and found it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429252 - 7 years ago, and also about Zuckerberg.

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...