I find it interesting that anytime pg posts a comment it gets upvoted like crazy even if it isn't particularly brilliant. Honestly, I agree with him about this subject. I didn't check the market close, and the second largest daily increase in history is a great piece of information to be informed about. However, if an average user would have posted that it would have probably received a mix of agreement and "but it's not hacker news".

I realize that this is pretty much his site, and he makes the rules, but does that mean that we should all be hitting that little up arrow next to his name out of gratitude? Honestly, I don't think that he probably checks on the number of upvotes we have given him when looking at yc applications. Although, he may have some sweet filter algorithm that automatically takes that into account...

Maybe it's just that pg's comments are more relevant to this community? If a nickname didn't lend credibility to a comment, we could all post anonymously.

Also, users of this community likely want to read pg's comments, and upvoting is the surest way to get them noticed.

If he did have a filter (to look at who has upvoted him the most during YC application review), it would likely not weigh in favour of those who unfalteringly agree with everything he says.

> I find it interesting that anytime pg posts a comment it gets upvoted like crazy even if it isn't particularly brilliant.

My comment started out at -1, got voted up to 5ish or so, and after pg made his comment, got voted down again (not that I particularly care). He certainly does have a lot of influence, but that's not a bad thing - I think many of us arrived here because we like his writing and what he's done with this site.

Agreed. I'm not saying that it's bad that pg has a lot of influence. It's just interesting to me how quick we are to follow him even against the trend of the community, and perhaps our own individual thinking.

It ends up on pages like cnn.com, just like lots of other news that's important to many people. I guess once in a while it's easy enough to ignore, but with all the volatility, this was the third or fourth time I'd seen a post about the stock market bouncing around, and thought to myself that it's really not that interesting.

I don't check cnn.com. I use filters like HN and twitter.