This is the point I was trying to make at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32769925 by quoting pg's 15-year-old bit about how empty positive comments aren't so bad (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). It's true that they don't contain any more information than empty negative comments, but they don't degrade the threads the way empty negative comments do.
Unfortunately people took that as some sort of pro-monarchist stance!
Who decides what's "empty positive" vs "empty negative"? What you frame as pro-monarchist vs anti- can be as easily framed as anti-egalitarian vs pro-egalitarian. So anti-egalitarian empty comments were allowed, while pro-egalitarian ones were held to a higher standard.
"Empty" praises and supports for one side of the position - a political position in a complex issue, not just "Thanks" like PG writes - are not really empty, they're the tools of populist campaigns.
I will accept boring positivity over boring negativity any day, and as dang responded, that is basically his approach here too. I think boring comments in general should be dissuaded but frankly this post on HN was never going to generate much interesting convo anyway
