It's not that surprising there are many founders lurking on HN. Many people who are famous in the tech world comment here once in a while. It's not a stretch to imagine that a lot of people from that demographic are active but silent users/consumers.
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.
I 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
I 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.
He'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.
It'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.
Ya 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.
