We appear to have burned 393... Wait, 394... User comments on the subject.

So if it's empty, so is commenting on HN, I'd extrapolate. Otherwise, it's gotten the attention of the sort of people who comment on HN, and that's something.

I think HN folks are commenting because:

1. These political threads always bring out the most ideologically strident folk

2. Developer time/experience is impacted by these changes.

While I personally think these banners are fine and good to raise awareness, I do agree that there's a moral grandstanding element as well. I'm often puzzled why it's so controversial a belief to have. I don't see why folks are so annoyed at these banners though because I've been annoyed for years and years at crappy ASCII/figlet drawings that libraries/apps output that are garbled in my terminal's width/encoding and yet people still add those.