Thank you for putting this in words; it's been rattling around in my head too.
I feel like the Peter Thiel world has eaten the Moxie Marlinspike world, and this is such a huge, monstrous loss for intellectual curiosity, individual liberty, and human flourishing.
I disagree with the GP simply because this has been the state of the world since, well, forever. Witness the entire hippie and rock culture of the 60s and beyond. Imbalance of wealth and non-proportionality to labour has been a topic for millenia, not for decades.
And this has not led to any loss of intellectual curiosity or "eaten" any of the non-mainstream world.
Basically, there is always the mainstream, and there is always the counter-culture. HN lives in this weird mixture where it brings together both profit-seeking minds, but also is majorly a community of rebel types (hackers, freedom [not just software] aficionados and academics, just to name a few — and obviously, not all of them are the rebel types, but they are certainly not the "mainstream").
And each of us also lives somewhere on that N-dimensional continuum between searching for profit, fame/recognition, other mainstream behaviours and personal values which don't align with the "mainstream".
I feel like the Peter Thiel world has eaten the Moxie Marlinspike world, and this is such a huge, monstrous loss for intellectual curiosity, individual liberty, and human flourishing.