I usually enjoy PG's articles but this one seems almost attacking some specific group without naming it.
> "It's unfair that so-and-so is famous," but "It's unfair that so-and-so is famous, and not me."
I believe this only takes < 1% of haters, since "Not me" is not very sustainable and would die out soon. The majority of haters are "us vs them" mentality, which makes hate persist decades. If someone hates a movie maker or a company, it's either:
1. It's DC vs Marvel. They are similar enough to the rest of the world, but there are nuances to the haters and fanboys. Similar things are Vim vs Emacs, Java vs C#. There were also flamewars between Intel and AMD fans, but since Intel clearly outperformed in previous years, both alliances seem died out almost at the same time -- It's just a CPU.
2. He actually hates the genre/category. He hates comic movies as a whole, as it absorbs most of the resources in the market, making the genre he loves never to be cost-efficient to be made anymore. There were some extraordinary movies in the 20th century because movie companies are still exploring business models.
> "because anyone famous knows how random fame is"
This is where the problem is, just we don't know how to fix it yet. Haters are just a phenomenon. Not only it's random, but also it's ridiculous. Scammers exist because people are vulnerable to scamming; Tiktok exists because people are vulnerable to the designed mechanism. Massive surveillance exists because it just works.
It's more than Okay to criticize scammers instead of competing them.
> "although they are occasionally talented, they have never achieved much."
> "successful enough to have achieved significant fame"
It's very hard to correlate success with fame. Taking PG's Lisp vs Blub example, if someone was evangelizing functional programming in the early 90s, they would never as successful as mediocre OO experts. It takes time. PG has spent so much effort on evangelizing Lisp, he never as famous as Martin Fowler or Uncle Bob in the industry.
As another example, Uncle Bob coined the term SOLID. I found almost all my colleagues know SOLID, most of my colleagues know Uncle Bob. However, those people behind those ideas like Barbara Liskov and Bertrand Meyer are much lesser known.
> "It's unfair that so-and-so is famous," but "It's unfair that so-and-so is famous, and not me."
I believe this only takes < 1% of haters, since "Not me" is not very sustainable and would die out soon. The majority of haters are "us vs them" mentality, which makes hate persist decades. If someone hates a movie maker or a company, it's either:
1. It's DC vs Marvel. They are similar enough to the rest of the world, but there are nuances to the haters and fanboys. Similar things are Vim vs Emacs, Java vs C#. There were also flamewars between Intel and AMD fans, but since Intel clearly outperformed in previous years, both alliances seem died out almost at the same time -- It's just a CPU.
2. He actually hates the genre/category. He hates comic movies as a whole, as it absorbs most of the resources in the market, making the genre he loves never to be cost-efficient to be made anymore. There were some extraordinary movies in the 20th century because movie companies are still exploring business models.
> "because anyone famous knows how random fame is"
This is where the problem is, just we don't know how to fix it yet. Haters are just a phenomenon. Not only it's random, but also it's ridiculous. Scammers exist because people are vulnerable to scamming; Tiktok exists because people are vulnerable to the designed mechanism. Massive surveillance exists because it just works.
It's more than Okay to criticize scammers instead of competing them.
> "although they are occasionally talented, they have never achieved much."
> "successful enough to have achieved significant fame"
It's very hard to correlate success with fame. Taking PG's Lisp vs Blub example, if someone was evangelizing functional programming in the early 90s, they would never as successful as mediocre OO experts. It takes time. PG has spent so much effort on evangelizing Lisp, he never as famous as Martin Fowler or Uncle Bob in the industry.
As another example, Uncle Bob coined the term SOLID. I found almost all my colleagues know SOLID, most of my colleagues know Uncle Bob. However, those people behind those ideas like Barbara Liskov and Bertrand Meyer are much lesser known.