You are also 100% right that I could have been more positive and constructive. I did intend to be lighthearted rather than mean, but tone is difficult in plaintext.
I see a lot of these types of comments on hn/reddit/twitter/etc, and (painting with a broad brush) the authors are typically pointing out trivial or spurious concerns, and phrasing it to cast doubt on the entire analysis. Often, the authors are asking about something that's easily searchable (here, cmd-F for "sex" will show a subsection of the methods dedicated to sex-specific effects), or naively ignoring the existing practices of the field.
There are no bad questions, but there are certainly bad attitudes. I'll be the first to admit the flaws in academia, including that many papers are imperfect and many are bad, but I think the dismissive comments from authors who haven't engaged with the material are just as much a disserve to the conversation around any study.
Of course, that may be another issue with tone in plaintext :)
Nobody wants another cesspool like /. was in its hay day, but ultimately only HackerNews/Ycombinator are harmed by this phenom of over-moderation.
For example, whose brilliant idea was it to create a user community that downvotes on comments hostile to Chinese Communist Party (that aims nuclear weapons at us while supporting North Korea in every sense and planning to kill our trading partners in Hong Kong and Taiwan) or on comments brutally critical of Apple for abusive trade practices? A lot of the downvotes also come from users that are obviously very inexperienced and unable to understand subtle contexts leading one to believe that a great way to solve this “problem” would be to only allow moderation by senior members of the community, as determined by peer votes, not by account age.