I totally disagree. When you visit a website, you're imposing a cost on the website owner because they have to pay for bandwidth and servers to process your request. In my view, crypto has always been about incentive alignment. Filecoin doesn't really work, but their idea was that when requesting a file a small fee to you pay the person who serves it to you. Overall this makes more sense to me than having some guy pay to host the file himself and hope that he decides to keep doing that until the end of time.
HN comments aren't free to host though. There is compute involved. How are they paying for that compute?
If it is out of boredom and good will, that's cool. But I very much am keeping that in mind when I comment here. I don't expect a hobby site to stay up long term because they'll just shut it down when it stops being fun.
If HN is paying for this from advertisements and job postings, well there is your answer. It is commercial.
You can’t get around the fact that HN is pay to play too though. that is my point.
You aren’t paying a fraction of a cent to post comments, but you’re paying in other ways. You just prefer the business model of HN, but i find the fraction of a cent model to be more straightforward and clear.