[trompetenaccoun]

People making fallacious or otherwise nonsensical comments is a problem all over social media. Like you say it's common that articles aren't properly read, and I'm sure most of us are guilty of it sometimes. There can be many other possible explanations though. For one, there are and always have been trolls. We're all different ages, education levels and intelligence here as well, that can make a big difference because some simply don't understand why their arguments aren't logical, no ill intentions. Lastly we should consider that GPT-3 & co are already here. Probably less on HN than Reddit, Fakebook and Twitter, but it's obvious that governments and corporations are using bots to influence social media in general.

So how are you going to protect against this? ANNs are great at answering these questions, and the AI can't outsmart itself. By making it harder to comment you'd actually lose more human commenters, because like others say what you suggest is frustrating, most people wouldn't bother. We'd be left worse off.

Imo rather than putting computers in charge, we might soon have to consider the opposite: Checks for users to verify that they're human. This will probably have to be done by humans themselves, but I've not seen a really practical idea of how it could be done yet.