To be clear, I'm not saying that such people do not exist. I'm saying that there's no effective way to estimate their number.
If the outcome is the same then the twitter-promoting explanation is simply a smokescreen.
I would not have cared at all about some contest on HN for a YC acceptance if it weren't for him mentioning it on Twitter. In fact, I would not have even known it was happening.
And now that I've seen the way both HN and YC has handled this throughout, including the attitude you've had towards his application since the beginning, I wish that he hadn't mentioned it on Twitter at all and my nearly 6-month-long streak of forgetting that HN exists had continued unbroken.
We could probably keep sparring over this, but the results are clearly not going to change and HN does not look any more like a community I want to be a part of than it did so many months ago.
Pinboard's application had the best discussion.
> How many such people exist?
raises hand
Hi, my account is 3000 days old today, only a little less old than your own. I went back and checked and it turns out that I didn't vote for Pinboard, but that's largely because I hadn't been active on HN in quite a while and I didn't think it was necessary. I did voice support for Maciej in the comments there.
I genuinely wanted to see him go through the program ("like a bowling ball through a python"), and not just for entertainment purposes. I think it would have been a valuable cross-pollination for everyone involved.
I've generally felt that HN -- and to a greater degree, YC -- aren't particularly welcoming towards people like me. I got fed up enough that I wrote a news reader to mine HN for articles just so that I wouldn't be tempted to visit HN as often, and when that broke a while back, I never bothered to fix it. Literally the only reason I'm here now is because Maciej mentioned it on his Twitter account. I've always been an outsider here. Seeing YC accept another, more successful outsider would have been nice.
This fiasco has all the scent of cliqueish hostility towards Maciej, you have been non-stop and relentlessly accusing him of being a troll (and you're smart enough to know better than to claim to know someone's psychology better than they do over the internet), and the results stink like a US election.