He puts the bubble pop down to people needing human connection, 'feeling cared for', but his example shows the AI customer support simply getting nowhere.
I'm an advocate of mean answers, if they're well-placed. I've seen them work at kuro5hin.org; they're 'area effect' weapons against stupid posts (by example), stronger than just a downvote. The truth is, as a site grows, you really only want a subset of the readership posting, and you want the rest to think twice before doing it (that sounds bad, but if you want read-quality and not write-quantity, you've got to do something to make people pay attention). Now kuro5hin.org is pretty much dead, but I don't think that was the cause.