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Two unrelated co-founders of multi-billion dollar fintech making anonymous accounts to comment here within 10 minutes of each other seems extremely unlikely to
by darawk 5y ago
Two unrelated co-founders of multi-billion dollar fintech making anonymous accounts to comment here within 10 minutes of each other seems extremely unlikely to happen organically. Consider that the second one is a reply comment to the first. What would have to be true for this to be organic is:
1. The first person arrives organically, which is plausible.
2. The second person sees their comment within 10 minutes of it being posted.
3. Decides that they are going to respond, and respond anonymously.
4. Makes an anonymous account.
5. Writes the comment
All within 10 minutes. Consider further that if this were legit, and you were the founder of a multi billion dollar tech company, would you write any comment like this that quickly? Wouldn't you spend a while reading exactly what it was you were saying to make sure you couldn't be identified, or didn't say the wrong thing? I certainly would.
It's not necessarily implausible that Patrick is secretly an asshole. But it is pretty implausible that these two comments were organic and independent.
- dd36 5y agoThey may know each other? And have asked for support. If you run a large company, you know others.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoI find it unlikely, but not extremely so given the environment (HN). It's very plausible to me that these comments are organic and independent. We have already had Patrick Collison and Brian Armstrong comment on this post (That I know of). I'm sure that many other high profile people in tech have since seen it as well. The timeframe is somewhat suss, but I don't find it unbelievable. E: other people also corroborate somewhat similar stories - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389177 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389191 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29389509
- Macha 5y agoTo be fair the others are also very low activity anonymous accounts created within the last 12 months.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoThis is not at all surprising given the dynamics of the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture). Longstanding, commenting users are incredibly rare in the scheme of things. E: active <-> commenting
- Macha 5y agoActive users are disportionately represented amongst people actively commenting, however
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoI don't understand your point here... Active users being disproportionately represented by people commenting is probably correct, but it doesn't provide any useful information about the minority of users who don't comment often. I'm saying that an account being mostly inactive (In terms of commenting) is not at all surprising. Someone could have been actively browsing HN for months/years without commenting, so I don't think comment activity is a good indicator of credibility when lurking is the default behaviour for almost all users. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of comments per user followed a power law distribution.
- darawk 5y agoHe's not saying its an indicator of credibility. He's speaking to the probability of two infrequent commenters commenting. The density of frequent commenters in all comments is very high.
- datavirtue 5y agoIf I get even remotely busy I forget all about HN. I can't imagine anyone trying to run a company wasting time here.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gonehome 5y agoIt's not that unlikely - a lot of us in SV are on HN all of the time. It's the default 'waiting for something' site to check (along with Twitter). If you saw a negative story about a friend you'd be more likely to comment.
- darawk 5y agoYa I don't find it to be at all implausible that two such people could be browsing HN. I just find it to be implausible that they commented within 10 minutes of each other just by chance.