Hacker News Reader

Comment by xxxtentachyon | Hacker News Reader

Or just not filter names on an app like Lyft. You can't even see other users' names. Who is potentially being harmed by even a malicious Professor Fuck?

View on HN

Drivers? Cannot imagine it being a big problem people having really offensive names though, after all you are actually meeting the driver irl and expect them to.. well, drive you.

Drivers have to go the in-personal approval thing first though, and they'd present their driver's license that would have their name on it - so the Lyft/Uber/etc employee who approves their driver status would presumably also verify that their name is real.

zulln isn't saying drivers are spoofing their names. zulln is saying drivers are being harmed by riders spoofing their names.

If the drivers are harmed, why not just allow people to use their name regardless of offensiveness and then just display it to drivers as "Professor F*". Sure, it's not ideal but it prevents people arbitrarily being kicked off the system and from drivers being offended by their passengers' names.

Or, perhaps people just shouldn't be offended by names. There are more important things in life.

If your driver’s name was Hitler Did Nothing Wrong Nazis Rule, would you want to drive with them? I think name filtering like this is incredibly dumb and have never seen a good implementation of it. But “don’t be offended” is rarely the blanket answer people seem to think it is.

Don’t know much about Lyft in particular, but with the amount of reports and cancellations you get with a name like that you’d get booted of the platform pretty quickly, no?

It is not the same for drivers though. Drivers have to use their real name as in their driving licence . I doubt that a registered legal name is going to be that kind of offensive.

I'd want to know if that was their name, so I could not get into their car.

If that's the person's name, should they be excluded from those apps? Also: shouldn't they change their names in those extreme cases?

Not only do drivers see your name, but I believe when you do a Shared Lyft, other riders also see your first name. And customer support will see your name as well.

In general, just because someone is providing a service to you (e.g. driving you, providing customer support, etc) doesn't mean they should be unnecessarily exposed to offensive language.

It’s not “offensive language” if it’s legitimately part of someone’s name (and I don’t mean the obvious bullshit cases, but cases where someone has had the name since birth).

> You can't even see other users' names.

You do see their first/given name for identification on pickup.

I call those systems "auto-censorship".

They are as dumb and undesirable as incomplete regex email filters in web forms.

Every single one ever written will have this problem. And ironically, absolutely nobody reading a fart joke will ever be offended. But the millions of people who are denied service and not twitter famous enough to reach a dot-com employee are very much offended.

...Also, the single reason to add those auto-censorship features is to please advertisers, not to protect users/drivers from fart jokes.

Expect Advertisement on lyft very, very soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com