Let's see, going off of just top-level comments in this thread alone:
didip, timonoko, mark_I_watson, icapybara, _pdp_, agentifysh, sanreau,
There's no way to know if these are genuine thoughts or incentivized compelled speech.
nativeit has a good way of putting it.
Your replies to "anonnon" make me less than hopeful for the future of HN in regards to AI. Seems like this might be trending in the direction of Reddit, where the interests are basically all paid for and imposed rather than being genuine and organic, and dissent is aggressively shut out.
"Curious conversation" does not really apply when it is compelled via monetary interest without any consideration toward potentially serious side effects.
"At least when herding cats, you can be sure that if the cats are hungry, they will try to get where the food is."
This part of the guy's comment is actually funny and apt. Somehow that escaped you when you wrote your threat reply. That makes me wonder how mind-controlled you are.
"yupyupyups" has a small summary of some of the negatives, yet is being flagged.
"techpression" similarly does, though is a bit more negative in his remarks. Also being flagged.
So the whole thread reads like this:
1.) talking about benefits? bubble to the top
2.) criticize? Either threatened by Dang or flagged to the bottom
Sounds a whole lot like compelled speech to me. Sounds a whole lot like mind-control.
It's pretty sad to see really.
It might just be your rule system. I personally want to see criticism. I don't have the sensitivity you have toward personal attacks or what you "deem" personal attacks when it is text on-screen. I don't care. I want to see what useful information might come out of it. I think your policing just makes everything worse to be honest. The thread will just die out in a day anyway.
I think I have criticized it in the past and you or some other staff said that it's a slippery slope toward useless aggressive banter that derails topics, but I don't know. I really don't agree with it. That's just my life experience.
Reddit is kind of like this. And it's basically turned into imposed topics rather than organic topics with massive amounts of echo-chambering in each delusional sub-reddit. Anything remotely against the grain is harshly culled as soon as possible. You can only imagine what the back-end looks like for that kind of thing. Money being involved at many steps is guaranteed.
And yeah as another commenter pointed out, this one guy's blog being at the top of hacker news every time is potentially suspicious as well.
I think I originally came to this place more than Reddit 10+ years ago because yeah it felt like people just excited and curious about their tech topics and it didn't feel like it was being rampantly policed or pushing a political agenda etc. I guess I should just not participate in these threads because the topic is tired on me at this point.
Wait I just read your user page and this is actually hilarious:
"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."
Marion Milner, 'The Toleration of Conflict', Occupational Psychology, 17, 1, January 1943
This made me immediately and uncontrollably guffaw.