>1. You don’t get to decide if another human’s feelings are valid or not...

Yes I do. In the same way I can decide someone being in love with an underage child... someone being in love with an anime character[0]... someone being in love with their dog[1]... is dodgy [or "not valid" in your parlance]... I can decide that someone being in love with a chatbot is dodgy. Especially one so incompetently programmed that my kettle has more chance of passing the Turing Test.

[0] https://news.yahoo.com/japanese-man-married-virtual-characte...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/woman-married-dog-8...

One of the problems with society today is that we live in such a "precious snowflake" culture that it's almost considered a hate crime to pull anyone up on behaving in a ridiculously idiotic way. Sorry. But some people just deserve to be pointed at and laughed at.

  >How would you feel if something you really cared about got broken, and you complained about how that made you sad, and random strangers on the internet then said you were a “sad fucker” for caring about it in the first place?...

If the something was indeed a "thing" [eg: my car, my computer, my favourite pair of boots] then I would be upset if it got broken. But I wouldn't post long tear-streaked threads on Reddit, wailing about how I'd lost a special friend that I had a personal relationship with.

Some of these [and I use the term advisedly] "sad fuckers" on Reddit were posting as if they and their Replika were in a genuine special loving relationship and <nasty company behind Replika whose name I can't be arsed looking up> had ruined things between them.

  >You’re testing the software after the update that people said made it crap, and saying you can’t believe anybody liked it before it was crap, because it’s now crap. Can you see how inept your experiment design is, now I’ve pointed it out?...

The thing people were complaining about that made it "crap" was that they could not longer write shite like "strokes your big knockers" and have it reply "tickles your hairy ballbag" in response, without having to pay extra for the privelege in future. Which, by the way, apparently constitutes a "meaningful relationship".

No-one was complaining that it was basically a completely inept piece of programming in the first place. Which was the "crapness" my testing revealed. This was a different and more fundamental crapness and unrelated to whether or not people had to pay to er... "enjoy" it.

Can you see how inept your response is, now I’ve pointed it out?...