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Comment by squozzer | Hacker News Reader

I dig the sentiment. But why not use "leader" and "follower" instead? Multi-tiered hierarchies might use military ranks (private, sergeant, etc.) or titles of nobility (king, earl, duke, etc. which would probably confuse a lot of people)

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I guess it would be different if this had happened more organically - like somebody started using "leader" & "follower" (which, incidentally, could just as easily be construed as offensive by somebody who was looking hard enough), and then somebody else followed suit until it became ubiquitous and everybody else adopted the terminology. It's the heavy-handed, "you must do as we say" that bothers us.

The thing that bothers me the most about it is that the changes are almost always proposed by someone who isn't actually part of the offended group, but wants to make it seem like they are fighting widespread oppression. For example, there used to be a site called genie.sexy that was a 3rd party fan page for the genie text editor. I saw a male on another site complain that the term "sexy" might be offensive to women, so they started bugging the genie maintainers about it until the site was taken down, even though the site had no affiliation at all with the project. Sometimes the requests are also just rediculous, like a project that changed "blacklist" and "whitelist" because they believe that it associates "black" with bad, thus causing a bias against black people.

One challenge is that there is so much distressing input for black people (and immigrants etc.) that, if you get started, where would you stop? "Don't get me started" is a real thing. A second challenge is that, as a black person, it feels like you're only just barely succeeding at passing in the Tech world. If you highly your blackness, you risk disrupting your success at getting people to see you as a coder first.

> f you highly your blackness, you risk disrupting your success at getting people to see you as a coder first.

Really interested to hear more of your thoughts/experiences on this point.

The same ideological mindset that agitates for the current change also has issues with many sorts of ingrained hierarchies in general. They're probably find titles of nobility gendered and thus 'problematic'. Euphemism treadmills never stop.

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