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Comment by onetime0001 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why gender/pronouns is even being discussed. Someone’s personal feelings don’t really have any place in a question/answers site. It’s fine to respect a persons feelings and such when talking to a person but when answering a question or asking the question. The gender/pronoun is irrelevant.

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The folks moderating SE are very pedantic about the wording of passages. Once I called SE a "forum", and I was politely told not to call SE a "forum". I would really hate to be a person that is not very fluent in English and trying to interact with SE.

One of my latest questions got as first comment : "Please use English punctuation when writing in English."

Certainly polite but a bit jarring as a non-native speaker that feels fluent. Also a bit nonsensically-bureaucratic : I made the mistake because I didn't know any better, after the comment I still couldn't correct the mistake because I still didn't know any better, I wasn't even sure what rule of punctuation I had wronged.

I would've preferred a direct edit instead of a comment prompting though I guess that can be seen as worse by some people.

> ... nonsensically-bureaucratic : I ...

Maybe you put a space before a colon, and the eagle-eyed moderator spotted it :-)

(English rarely has a space before a punctuation mark — except for a dash in British usage. Americans—I think—do this.)

Yeah exactly, in French for example you put a space before a colon, a question mark, exclamation mark, while in English you don't, it is quite hard to spot for a lot of people.

OP is about someone who is extremely fluent in English, an expert in the eyes of the community, who was kicked out pecificaly for the sin of trying to interact with SE in fluent English.

It's confusing to me too. Very clearly this is a battle for which there are only losers and no winners.

Regardless of what SE should do with pronouns, a mod shouldn't get fired for clarifying

+1. Couldn't agree more!

This is not the first time nor this is specific to SO. Here[0] is another occurrence of something similar to those interested.

[0]https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...

SE's management with this rule is disarming any discussion on the matter a priori, thus avoiding any complication for itself.

Because for a lot of people part of their identity is wrapped up in how offended they can be and expressing it out loud.

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