For all the talk here about how PR and ads don't work and ad spending is a waste of time, it sure seems like it works wonders on the HN crowd.
For all the talk here about how PR and ads don't work and ad spending is a waste of time, it sure seems like it works wonders on the HN crowd.
So for example, there was a PR/press story of Gates "turning his attention to opportunities for innovation in VR", not one of "he's helping his colleague Myhrvold patent troll VR, because the opportunities there are too rich to pass up". Or here, Gates's dad "pushed him to excel", not as an old biography suggested IIRC, "taught him the most important thing was to win, leaving him ethically impaired".
As a rule of thumb, if you hear a self-serving story that lacks nuance, it's likely... incomplete. Maybe someday, hagiography will work less well, and we'll get self-serving stories with nuance, but for now, that doesn't seem the common case.