Without saying that I think LLMs are alive, I do think it matters. I have personally been cruel to an LLM in ways that would make me ashamed if I suddenly understand that it had feelings.
Same, I'm working on a plugin called "better-messages" to nudge me towards better behavior for my own sake. It seems to be model dependent if such words improve or degrade performance, I have seen it go both ways.
How do they get comments without being on the front page? :)
A post just needs to get a handful of organic upvotes soon after submission, to get near the top of the front page. And submissions can easily stay on the front page for hours without much discussion. They just have to be interesting enough that people consider them worthy of an upvote.