I'll be honest and blunt: I try to avoid his blog posts and comments as much as possible because I do find his contributions to be super spammy. It's about the frequency of his self-promotion (as a researcher in NLP it's tiresome to constantly see his self-promotion on nearly all posts on HN related to LLMs). Seems I'm not the only one.

If he posted on the ML subreddit while I was still a mod there (left after the API kerfuffle) I would have messaged him and asked him politely to tone it down.

I don't think I have been rude at all, and also seniority does not give any special authority over opinions.

My point was that the "creating the personal brand" part - which can seem something intentional - is just a byproduct of posting, writing and contributing. And he contributes because he has knowledge, opinions and things to say.

It's like writing your own blog with good content and getting organic traffic from search engines vs writing SEO content to get traffic and get noted.

Maybe I initially expressed myself not the way I really wanted.