For me, the motivation is that it's interesting to see someone grapple with the consequences of their work.

This guy is clearly no guru. And the sensationalism of the title is just media being media.

Yea, I think that's definitely an interesting thing to see in action. But what I'm pushing back against is the notion that this person's perspective is all that valuable: he doesn't even appear to have been that heavily involved in the feature. The point is that _Buzzfeed knows that_, and they know that this is just a lazy piece for a slow news day, that will be clicked on and shared by the more thoughtless parts of the Internet.

I definitely wouldn't be making this comment were the article about @jack, or someone else that Buzzfeed could make the case was responsible for the design and development of Twitter early and over time.

Why do you say "HN" is falling for it? Hacker News did not write the article. Buzzfeed did. We're simply commenting on it.

I'm not sure I understand this comment at all.

Buzzfeed is the one writing the clickbait. Obviously they would not be the ones falling for anything. HN, collectively, put this article on the front page, treating shallow nonsense as if it's notable because it feeds our biases. It's a data point that speaks ill of the collective discernment abilities of HN (and the quality of the community) that we put content-free clickbait on the front page and discuss it as if it's valuable (or more accurately, use it as a fig leaf for soapboxing preexisting views).

This isn't some generalized "HN is full of dumb low-effort takes and clickbait" complaint; I got used to that years and years ago. But part of being on an online forum is pushing back against stuff like this and calling out low quality content when we see it.