He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.
I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.
All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.
But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.
EDIT: My pet theory is that it has to do with the general aging of the users here. There's a kind of well-to-do, Western, mid-40s (usually male) social opinion I see upvoted a lot here that I feel like hits the sweet spot of the folks who still read this site regularly. But it's just a theory really.
> It feels like the tech industry is having a moment where a lot of us are looking critically at the work we're doing and the effects it has on the society we live in.
I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the tech industry. It was where all the founders hung out 15 years ago. It's now just a place where IT workers talk.
> Sometimes that's not fun but it is important. Sorry if that checks the vibes too much for you.
No I just do what everyone else does which is talk about tech elsewhere. I spent a lot of time over the last 15 years here so I'm sad that the place has changed, but at the end of the day I have several alternatives.
Moreover there's plenty of problems in the world out there. A few wars in progress, a genocide or two. My relatives spent the last few weeks in hiding because a government failed. MrBeast's engagement practices are probably the very lowest of my worries. If only HN comments could change the world...