[heliumtera]

>It was always difficult to get normal people to understand why the tech billionaires are so bad

By the "greying out" of your comment, I would assume two things: First, the difficulty you describe is not on the past. Second, normies are here in much bigger proportion than a hacker would assume, and they are offended on the behalf of tech billionaires.

[e2le]

Some might even agree with their dystopic vision of the future.

[mrguyorama]

One outcome of the Epstein files release is getting direct evidence, very clearly, how goddamned stupid and crass and uninteresting these assholes are.

They talk like the dumbest 1850s british aristocrats. They talk as if they are discussing how lazy the Irish are and how that is definitely why they are starving. They have objectively stupid opinions. They believe themselves especially smart as they fire off one or two sentences about high school level philosophy topics, and they somehow find a way to generate wrong answers to questions that really shouldn't even have wrong answers. All the while, they misspell everything because apparently they are outright illiterate too.

Like, they say such utterly stupid things as "Women are too emotional to make good decisions". As if they don't do the things they do for extremely petty reasons.

And yet, still some morons all over the US think they must be geniuses because they fell ass backwards into a literal bubble and came out rich. You can publicly be an absolute moron and the Wealth propaganda in the US is so bad people will still insist you must be magically genius and only pretending to be stupid.

Did they even encrypt their "I'd like to purchase a rape of a little girl please" emails?

[jacquesm]

They're not so much offended by it as that they would like to join the billionaire class and believe that those in power may at some point come to review their voting behavior on HN. For instance, YC asked for your HN username on the application form.

Of course I don't think they'd stoop so low as to look at the votes on subjects like this but that's the chilling effect for you and technically they have that ability. And they definitely look at the comments.

[trinsic2]

>They're not so much offended by it as that they would like to join the billionaire class

Same thing happened in WWII Nazi Germany. This timeline has an eerie similar feeling as the masses line up to the slaughter.

[ryandrake]

I don't know. What percentage of HN commenters really have serious aspirations for being a YC founder? 0.01%? 0.001%? Im not sure "What will YC think of me" is really that much of a driver of commenting behavior here.

People simp for billionaires all over the web, not just on HN. I've never understood it, and I probably never will. But, there are enough of them and their billionaire-defense commentary pops up everywhere. Not to mention the obvious downvote rings that will hit you if you ever insult one of a few key billionaires with large followings. This is widespread behavior and not about wanting to be a startup founder.

[jacquesm]

That's a good question. Probably a low percentage but with the amount of people on HN that still adds up to a sizeable number of participants.

[edgyquant]

For me it’s because Peter Thiel has been pretty anti-transhumanism etc and he wasn’t stumped by the question he’s repeatedly answered it. Anyone who’s worldview is shaped by clips from tik tok should be downvoted

[trinsic2]

Bro you pair that with his other behavior and you can clearly see this is not a good guy. It's likely he is at least an accelerationist (Of the bad kind) of not more.