[pvg]

There's no analogy or wall of text that makes that comment unshitty and inviting of conversation. It's not a thing one should do on HN because it trashes the place. We resolve this by striving to control our own reflexive dickishness and downvoting/flagging the egregiously dickish comments, which is exactly what happened here.

[kragen]

I agree that it's a dickish, shitty comment, and uninviting of conversation. I don't agree that the reason it's dickish is that comments of the form "Please don't do such and such" are inherently dickish. I think that such comments are uncomfortable but necessary, and tabooing discussion of such conflicts does more harm than good—in addition to the reasons above, it would ensure that only the most disagreeable commenters dare to make them.

Undoubtedly, if you devote the minute and a half required to read my "wall of text" comment above, you will be persuaded by its reasoning.

[pvg]

I fixed the confusing bit, thanks. I'm not persuaded by the reasoning because I don't see how the reasoning is relevant - we're talking about a specific dickish comment in a specific social place with its specific norms. These are so well understood and established the comment got flagblasted by users and moderator scolded on top of that - effectively the maximum penalty/public shaming an HN comment can get. It's not a hypothetical different context in which some kind of hypothetical value eventually comes from such comments - the bad comment and the bad subthread are concretely in front of us.

[kragen]

I think the non-hypothetical value that came from this comment in this case is that it surfaced good reasons for writers to use generative AI and showed that many people support doing so. I would have liked to see that happen in a much more civil fashion, but I don't think it could happen at all without some openly stated form of the initial objection to writers using generative AI. So I think that's the wrong aspect of the initial comment to taboo.

My concern is that the flagblasting and moderator-scolding, while certainly justified by the comment in question, will cause the collateral damage of discouraging politer versions of such comments in the future. So I think it's worthwhile to affirm that criticizing people's behavior to their face is not in fact inherently dickish, but rather a much better alternative to doing it behind their back, or to finding ways to silently exclude them, or people you suspect of being like them.