[joe_the_user]

I appreciate someone actually putting an argument for this, just so we can tease out what's wrong here.

Customer support is one place where I don't want to just "send information". I want to be able to "exert leverage". I want my communication to be able to impel the other actor to take action.

The thing with hn comments is that the guidelines are flexible, even things that violate the guidelines are a kind of communication and play into the dynamics of the site. The "feelings" of hn have impact (for good and ill but still important).

[openmajestic]

Customer support is interesting here. I think you're very right (personally I think that the new AI in the article is a bad idea). I wonder if the ideal is transforming speech into multiple modalities. Maybe make the speech kinder to avoid activating people emotionally and then offer something visual that indicates emotions or "give a shit" level. But I dislike speech as a modality; the single channel nature is incredibly limiting IMO.

For HN comments, I think you're right. But I think there is still lots of potential there, from tooling to help Dang use his time more effectively to tooling that you can switch on when you are in a bad mood that lets you explore your curiosity but filters out/transforms the subset of comments that you don't have the emotional capacity to deal with well.

The cool thing is that this tech can be easily layered on top of the actual forum (does vertical integration give you anything? certainly crazy expensive) and so the user can be in control of what filters/auto-moderation they embrace. Plus text makes it easy to always drill deeper and see the original as needed.