I'm sure it's not on purpose, but it made me think about Social Justice language war: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-folks/
(I even had to switch to my anonymous HN account to post this.)
I would prefer to think about this (very cool!) startup instead.
Since I'm now going to get asked wtf I'm doing mucking with people's text:
I help YC startups with their Launch HNs. Mainly I coach them to take out anything that sounds like marketing or PR, and to add things that the community tends to find interesting. Usually we'll agree on a final draft by email, but sometimes we skip the fine-tuning step, and in that case I sometimes do it live, because I'm a compulsive editor. Part of the intention is to sand off sharp edges that might get things snagged in offtopicness, so I'm glad to see your comment as a sort of natural experiment demonstrating that this is useful :)
By the way, I'm happy to help anyone else with this too. That is, if any of you want to present your startup or some other major piece of work to HN, in the style of this post and https://news.ycombinator.com/launches, you can email a draft to hn@ycombinator.com and I'll try to look it over and give you feedback. The only catch is that I can't always reply quickly, and my worst case latency is abominable because the HN inbox undergoes periodic overwhelm. Still, it does mostly work. If you want to do this, you can look at the advice I give YC startups here: https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html. The logistical aspects only apply to YC startups, but the communication aspects are more important and they are universal.
Is there a way to let you know about similar sharp edges, in order to avoid writing offtopic comments like mine?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
"Folx" is unquestionably the result of the language war: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-folx/
This is true. However, few active people are enough to poison the discussion. Examples:
* erasure of gendered language from source code comments
* "master" branch controversy
* BLM banners in numerous open source project
* Python PEP8 English controversy: https://github.com/python/peps/pull/1470/commits/89b72cf7261...