Yes.
Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Ironically, erasing that kind of stuff is likely very good good for training large language models.
> Erasing the personal touch out of someone’s writings is erasing them.
Yeah, as I mentioned in the grandparent comment, I think the site was better thought of as a wiki of questions/answers than a forum. Including things like pleasantries/signatures on a wiki-adjacent site probably is not the right use for that kind of site. (Personally, I was incredibly frustrated by SO but for a very different reason - edits to questions or answers, etc. that fixed typos, pointing out that an answer's linked app had been dead for 5 years, etc. were often rejected.)
It pissed off znpy so bad that many years later they still recall on HN how irritated that made them! Now you could argue that letting znpy's pleasantries stay would have cumulatively pissed off more people in the long wrong. But I very seriously doubt it would.
2. But yeah, I think of SO as not really being setup like a bulletin board - I think of it as closer to a wiki, where it isn’t designed for people to talk to each other, but instead to generate hopefully the most useful questions and answers.
3. Maybe other people editing out pleasantries/signature is actually a good thing as others will then see your question as higher quality?