HN goes about AMAs by getting them to post here. Then people ask them random questions whenever they want. There's no focused idea of an AMA. I think because there's very little celebrity worship on HN compared to other sites. People here tend to look at others' accomplishments and say, "I can do that."

> I think because there's very little celebrity worship on HN compared to other sites.

Glad you added the qualifier "compared to other sites" there .. because I see a lot of hero worship on HN. (Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, &etc.) However it seems to be a lot less robotic.

I hope we can one day get Mr. Johnson to answer a few questions - I agree with other commenters that he is indeed an inspiration and it'd be great for my kids to know more about him. Oops, there I go, creating a hero to worship .. ;)

I find that HN has a slightly different version of worship. Posts by some folks such as PG get auto-voted to the top, but at the same time quite often the replies to the post are far different than on other sites. To use PG as an example I've often found that replies to his posts that make it to the top are well thought out disagreements/counterpoints which instigates further discussion. On the other hand, disagreeing with an AMA response on reddit gets you downvoted into oblivion unless the reddit hive mind already hates the AMAer.

> Posts by some folks such as PG get auto-voted to the top

My understanding of HN's sorting is that it takes into account the average karma of a poster's past comments and includes that in the weighting. Given that, it's not surprising that pg and others are always at the top (and it's a bit of a self-perpetuating system for power users).

Yes, this self-perpetuation of platforms for power users business does indeed create 'meritocracy and value' of the readers attention and time. But then again, in many cases, it does not. When I broach the subject personally, I feel that HN works for me because it seems to promote more for 'the idea of the successful action/techno hero' rather than any particular individual, but then again all Internet forums promote the Archetype that they attract. Which is to say that any particular word, itself, that we put out there on the Internet, eventually collates with other 'words', 'subjects', 'forms', and so on .. forming what we have. Perhaps I am responding more the language of the hero in the HN/reddit zeitgeist, also, the banal.