I had a tour guide in German who told me he was one of the few people he knew who had read any of it because he'd spent time in the US as a exchange student.
I would disagree. The general principles for growth hacking always apply--far better than traditional marketing techniques do anyway. Growth hacking is, at its core, the art of building marketing into the product itself and then pulling in the initial customers/clients to kickstart that process.
But to go to your point PG has a funny line about cofounders. If you can't get a cofounder for your startup your idea will never blow up--because you couldn't even get one other person to agree to work on it with you for free
It's not that it's luck behind viral videas, it's that they tend to spread or become popular in their own unique ways and attempts to deduce general rules from examples you had nothing to do with is usually foolhardy.
There is some science behind virality and for that I'd recommend looking at Jonah Berger
HN is a testament to what happens when you make a thing for a very specific group of people and only them.
It sort of reminds me those companies you hear about every once in a while that say "No" to being sold in Wal-Mart. It seems crazy but there is value in passing on certain kinds of growth.
The only hiccup to this plan in HN's case is that the very specific community it is targeted to is itself growing and growing. So staying "small" might be impossible.
Please, I have written pretty extensively about the problems with the ad impressions model--I think it's the root of the YT issue and most the low quality blogging we see.
I don't get paid by the pageview and if I did, it would be an inconsequential part of my annual income at this point. I write columns about ideas I find interesting. If I wanted pageviews I'd probably publish it somewhere other than the Observer
It goes the other way around too. Most reporters and bloggers get their basic facts from Wikipedia. So it's a feedback loop. Wikipedia frames reporting which can then be used to "support" or cite that very same framing.
Almost every public figure has seen some inaccuracy from their Wikipedia page come up in a news story or an interview at one time or another.
Actually, in the book I go much earlier. Upton Sinclair wrote a book of media criticism in 1912 that was the genesis for my theories. Yellow journalism predates Bernays by more than a few decades.