You can't get drunk and tweet dumb shit as a CEO.
You cannot remain CEO if you do.
This is not a controversial position to have.
'Stupid,' 'shameful:' Tech workers on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's rant
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Re: 'Stupid,' 'shameful:' Tech workers on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's rant
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way HN is set up, having 500 comments would have contributed to that. The "flamewar detector" the mods sometimes mention seems to take comments/votes and comments/time into consideration then penalises threads.
Yep. The HN users see is highly curated. Mostly by algorithms, sometimes by humans.
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Re: 'Stupid,' 'shameful:' Tech workers on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's rant
#63IMO, it is bad to threaten people with painful deaths. Apparently that is a controversial opinion within this community.
It isn’t illegal to say what he said but it’s not the right tone for his position. The slow drop into political violence begins with speech normalizing calling for death and murder. I just hope everyone outraged analyzes their own speech. I hold a lot of opinions outside the bounds of cocktail conversation, but I was having cocktails with my (blue city, professional) friends and they made a joke about someone needing…
> The slow drop into political violence begins with speech normalizing calling for death and murder.
I have seen this a lot lately in online discussions of homelessness and people accused of crime. It's very unsettling.
That is the context of why Mr Tan wrote that -- there's a popular narrative that specific individuals are complicit in crime and homelessness in San Francisco. This leads to lots of ad hominem and in my view rises to the level of conspiracy theory in many -- it's not like every problem is the fault of a single office holder or even a "cabal" of them. Voting against someone or supporting different candidates is one thing. Calling them solely responsible for all that you consider evil, escalating to the level of death threats, is quite another.
And that's just politicians. It's also routine to see people call for violence on homeless people or people accused of crime.
Re: 'Stupid,' 'shameful:' Tech workers on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's rant
#64I hope YC quickly moves on from Garry Tan. This sort of childish behaviour is not just dragging YC down but the startup community as a whole.
Agreed. SF politics is profoundly broken, and many of the Supervisors are sclerotic and out of touch. But wishing death on them publicly is very very serious.
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Re: 'Stupid,' 'shameful:' Tech workers on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's rant
#65I hope YC quickly moves on from Garry Tan. This sort of childish behaviour is not just dragging YC down but the startup community as a whole.
I wonder how many startup founders nowadays refuse to join an accelerator/take VC money due of the people leading it.
It happens occasionally. I think an interesting question is when would it be most likely to happen?
It wouldn’t be the marginally funded that’s for sure.
More likely the hottest startups with multiple offers.
Re: 'Stupid,' 'shameful:' Tech workers on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's rant
#66This sort of discourse would be flagged, moderated and possibly result in a ban here on HN. His actions seem to undermine a lot of what this community is meant to be about.
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Re: 'Stupid,' 'shameful:' Tech workers on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's rant
#67As a YC alum who worked with Gary Tan directly, this is… odd. Anyone who knows Gary knows he’s a (relatively) gentle human being. I can’t imagine him hurting a fly. His tweets seem totally out of character compared to the Gary Tan I personally knew. Maybe he has changed? I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
It's more the state of modern social media. Post Elon acquisition, many influential tech figures have discovered that being a provocateur on Twitter/X is more consistently successful at building an audience than genuine insight.
Post Elon acquisition? I mean Twitter has always been this.
Re: 'Stupid,' 'shameful:' Tech workers on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's rant
#68I hope YC quickly moves on from Garry Tan. This sort of childish behaviour is not just dragging YC down but the startup community as a whole.
It's worse than childish. The people called out in that bizarre tweet would probably have a conversation with their staff or the police about whether they or their families are in any kind of danger from this apparently popular guy wishing death upon them from the internet, or perhaps from one of his idiot followers. They might not know much about where Tan is coming from, but they know they work in a building where…
They would be perfectly reasonable to hire private security and sue Tan for damages to pay for that and whatever other measures that seem prudent for their own protection along with the pain and suffering that goes along with the very reasonable fear this tweet and its effects caused.
What he wrote was more or less the limit to what you can say before it becomes a serious crime.
Re: 'Stupid,' 'shameful:' Tech workers on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's rant
#69Related yesterday discussion:
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's online rant spurs threats to supes, police reports
Re: 'Stupid,' 'shameful:' Tech workers on Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan's rant
#70"...two $32 bottles of Roederer Estate sparkling wine"
I have half a dozen of these in my closet to get me through the month; is this supposed to be exorbitant? What's the point of talking about his reasonably modest stash we've been shown? Weird.
$24.99 on sale y'all.