Jrflowers' response exhibits a few cognitive biases and logical fallacies:
False dichotomy / black-and-white thinking: By suggesting that either all societal progress has been killed or none has, jrflowers presents an oversimplified view that ignores the nuanced reality.
Reductio ad absurdum: Taking the original question to an extreme conclusion ("all societal progress has possibly been killed") to make it seem ridiculous.
Straw man argument: Misrepresenting the original point to make it easier to attack. The original question asked about the potential impact, not claiming that all progress had been halted.
Sarcasm and dismissiveness: Rather than engaging with the question seriously, jrflowers responds with sarcasm, which doesn't contribute to a productive discussion.
If not and any criticism or even-surface-level inspection of how a question or statement is made, wouldn’t it be best to codify the “Yes, and…” improv rule (1) into your link (2)?
Mods on HN are people, and there's one person who posts publicly and responds to emails (dang). Moderator comments are not automated AFAICT, though they do lean heavily on standard language for all manner of self-evident reasons.
Mods also tend to get overwhelmed with busy threads and we've had a few particularly contentious ones in the past couple of days (middle-east conflicts).
Most HN moderation overall is accomplished through member votes and flags, and some automated tools to up- or down-rank submissions and automatically flag or kill submissions. There are a number of other factors at play, including the flamewar detector (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40437018>, generally, posts with more comments than votes), and banned sites / userIDs. But none of those result in moderator comments to the thread.
If you have further questions, email mods with your concerns at [email protected]. They're quite patient in explanations, which is how I know much of what I'm saying here, along with reading dang's mod comments, as I did when I found this thread.
I only do that in cases where it's appropriate (e.g. where both people were breaking the site guidelines to approximately the same degree), but in such cases it's convenient because it cuts out the "why me? what about the other person?" complaints which otherwise tend to be common.
Was good faith lost when this question was asked
> How much societal progress has been killed from the amount of time spent watching Mr beast videos?
or when this question was asked
> What in particular do you envision society could have accomplished without this man on youtube?
Is it bad faith because I said I didn’t know how to answer specifically, or is it bad faith because you decline to answer on principle?