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I don't understand how "replacing a manual process with an automated one provides positive value" is a controversial opinion on hacker news.

• LegitShady 5y ago
  It doesn't provide $1 worth of value to anyone but some of the highest earners for whom such a "time savings" of seconds might be valuable. It's primary value is to the person being rolled because they aren't paying for anything. Automating something people weren't getting laid to do provides value to someone else not the person paying. Maybe it's not controversial so much as misguided and looking at the picture from the wrong perspective. Who is it providing value to? What did that person save through the automation and how much is that worth if you actually parse out how many such "value periods" they experience in a day. The idea that a very simple division question is worth $1 when everyone has a cell phone they already paid for in their pocket to do division for them is ludicrous when you realize there are tens of thousands of such time periods in a day but very few people are making tens of thousands of dollars a day.