A fair question :/

Unfortunately your answer is this thread itself. As I am writing this comment it is Link #1 on HN. That is to say that people love this kind of content and it drives pageviews, so media outlets are incentivized to write about it. We have only ourselves to blame :/

People are just curious by nature. In this case, appears that the guy just wanted everyone to know who he is; bit ironic to me.

In this particular case? Because SLJ himself decided to. In TFA, it mentions that a) SLJ hasn't posted since December 31, and b) voluntarily gave an interview.

> Now that Startup L. is retired, Thompson doesn’t mind the secret getting out.

@raphman_ posted this link which directly addresses this question: https://syrah.co/joshdickson40/5604e5e10fc1786b0152a51a

I hadn't seen this, good read if you haven't either.

I am not talking my own book here because I was looking into it for other reasons mentioned in the linked piece - but, you can absolutely make the case that because the account's influence had grown so large, there was significant potential for conflict of interest that the public ought to know about. That sounds crazy, but that's also how big the account got.

Now, I obviously disagree with that opinion, but I'm also not a member of the media. It was also apparent after looking into it that there was absolutely no COA that would have justified outing him at the time.