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.
In the section quoted below for example, he starts off by writing about critiques, in which he appears to have immediately grasped for words that aren't suited for the purpose, such as how the nonsensical "personalized to" should have been "focused on". He add the completely unnecessary pseudointellectual "to one extent or another", to make it seem like he is intensely judging ideas. He then says the "social purpose" is "universal" which I'm not following the meaning of at all. I doubt many others are either, but it just seems like another pseudointellectual throwaway. He then follows that with "which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview", which is perhaps the most atrociously nonsensical and poorly laid out sentence fragment I've read in a long time. In the part following that, he needed a period before "actually" for it to make sense as he likely intended.
Honestly, it seems like he's just trying to write words as they come to him as if in a heated and rash spoken conversation, in which he has a elevated personal impression of erudition, compared to the people he believes he communicating down to.
"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."
The "social purpose of the critiques is universal" is saying that, in opposition to the disparate and varied, personalized, nature of the specific critiques, their social purpose is all the same.
This universal purpose is saying "I felt uncomfortable ... might have to re-evaluate world view ... I'll upvote all the detractors".
> elevated personal impression of erudition
This is ironic, I have to say.
Anyhow, I found it easy to read the comment. It does flow a bit like stream of consciousness, but it's comprehensible, probably in part because I agree with a good amount of it. You shouldn't expect polished prose in comment forums on the interwebs.
If you felt that it talked down to you (personalized), then perhaps evaluate the social purpose of your own comment (did you feel uncomfortable? I got the impression you did).
As to your second to last comment, I wouldn't have even mentioned it had the other commenter not mentioned how they found the prose jarring. To your question in your final line, I didn't say that I felt I was being talked down to, I said that the author seemed like he thought he was talking down to an audience below him, such as with his line where he mentions his startup friends whom he shared his text with, but wouldn't share the same with HN.