Also I see no reason why this is any more subjective than it claims—it's not asking for which language is some ill-defined notion of "best" but instead which ones people "like".

I think it's perfectly reasonable to dislike a language you've never used. You can't claim it's a "bad" language (for reasons perhaps even above not having a definition for "bad") but I can't claim that you don't dislike it.

That fact that people are disliking languages they've never used is one of the reasons I'd agree the poll is meaningless. Sure, it's reasonable to dislike a language for whatever reason, but that doesn't mean that the results of such a free form poll can be interpreted in any meaningful way.

You can dislike a language for a number of reasons that have little to do with using it while still being meaningful. e.g. community behaviour, community style, and relative number of security flaws in products that use that language.

Who cares, it's interesting. It's cool to just to gauge the general sentiment of the languages on HN.

There are several ways to find meaning in the results. I claim it is a(some what sloppy, non scientific) measurement of PL bias in the HN community.