>Like what real difference does it make to you?

the difference is that you get to see the unfiltered, unique perspective of a real human being. Just like I don't want to talk to anyone through an instagram or tiktok beauty filter or accent remover. If your thoughts are unordered, it's okay I'll take your unordered thoughts over some smoothed over crap.

Do people have really such a low opinion of themselves that they have to push every single thing through some kind of layer of artifice?

I like to think about it in terms of output-to-prompt ratio. For HN comments, I think an output ratio of 1 or less is _probably_ fine. Examples:

    - translating (relatively) literally from one language to another would be ~1:1.
    - automatic spelling/grammar correction is ~1:1
    - Using an LLM to help you find a concise way of expressing what you mean, i.e. giving it extra content to help it suggest a way of phrasing something that has the connotation you want, would be <1:1

Expansion (output > prompt) is where it gets problematic, at least for HN comments: if you give it an 8 word prompt and it expands it to 50, you've just wasted the reader's time -- they could've read the prompt and gotten the same information.

(expansion is perfectly fine in a coding context -- it often takes way fewer words to express what you want the program to do than the generated code will contain.)