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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

The r word isn’t nice. But that cannot be the reason to ban the server.

This sounds like an excuse. They mention fraud several times -but say it’s NOT because of fraud— but I almost perceive a wink when they mention it like that.

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You’d be surprised what kind of asinine bullshit they will ban a server over. Feels like everywhere you go these days some real or virtual administrator is pre-determining how much risk you’re allowed to put yourself in.

I joined the server and the first thing I saw was a mod saying the N word with hard R. Check their history and there's literally pages of it.

I didn't appreciate that so I reported it and left.

Lots of people confusing this with not liking WSB.

The other WSB discord which was linked to the subreddit was fine even though it was barely moderated. Rough around the edges like WSB tends to be... but fine as a place to hang out and see funny things.

This second server was extreme even by WSB standards.

The joke is "4chan found a bloomberg terminal" but really it's like Reddit found one... no one is as down right randomly gross or racist as people are on deep end 4chan or Reddit would have banned it a long time.

This server was really like if the worst part of 4chan pretended to know what a stock is. It wasn't even coherent by WSB standards, and the signal to noise made WSB proper look like an actual Bloomberg Terminal

Well, it is "Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal".

Different platforms have different baseline moderation policies, and in some cases that remains the differentiator in the platform itself (e.g. Parler). I dont think acting within the values of another site is a good excuse to not get banned by the one a community currently occupies

Discord is absolutely in their right to do as it may please with the platform. My point is more to the effect of the ethos of WSB is not a place for civil discourse and expecting otherwise is foolish. The only reason it exists on reddit is heavy moderation, and that's/was going to be impossible on Discord.

Hmm, Al Gore must be smiling. It’s 40 years late, but his dream is almost come true.

Not exactly sure what you're getting at.

Here is my position, as this seems to be increasingly foreign for many people I talk with. A private entity (person or enterprise) should be able to manage their servers without outside interference. If I open up a server privately, I should have the right to moderate it, or not, however I see fit. 4chan still exists (as of now), and IMO, should not be interfered with. If somebody wants to create an LDS chatroom where swearing and drinking coffee lands you a ban, more power to you. We should be allowed to freely associate as we see fit, and those who own the space can decide the rules for discourse.

Now, am I saying corporate interests would never actively coordinate with government or other powerful interests to maintain a certain narrative or obtain power, absolutely not. That is a totally different discussion, and probably relies on a bottom up approach. The plebs aren't going to change Twitter's TOS or the programming on FOX, and we shouldn't expect to either. The corporate media sphere is carefully curated for whatever drives their interests. That maybe engagement, supporting commercial or policy positions beneficial to immediate or patron interests, or just old fashioned Operation Mockingbird interference. It's best if we ditch it altogether.

So you joined a server and went crying to teacher since you saw a bad word you didn't like instead of just leaving the server and letting it be. It is people like you who are the problem. Banning benign communities for using bad words is what drives people into fringes and into the arms of actual bad actors.

“retard” is the most ironic example of the ineffectiveness of the euphemism treadmill.

And now, on GameFAQs, I could not include the term “tardive dyskinesia” in a post. It was refused because apparently the four character sequence “tard” cannot occur in any word.

They could, at the very least, simply implement a system that a human moderator receives an immediate notification when a any of their banned words is used, who will then use good human judgement, rather than such wide blanket bans of four character strings.

That ridiculous. There have been a few references to the Scunthorpe problem lately, so I won’t repeat it.

Are kids going to be prohibited from saying “tardy” When they’re late?

I would assume one can't talk of one's tardiness on GameFAQs, yes.

I would also assume that in class, context would be more easy. Of course, some people were fired over the use of the word “niggard”, but it's a fairly obscure word, but I did once see it in an English translation of the Qurʾān.

An instructor or professor of linguistics almost got cancelled because he was using Chinese words as an example of the usefulness in speech of useless filler words. “That one” which if you want to or make yourself to, can be made to sound like a racial insult.

That’s to say it’s no surprise that ignorant people will take offense before they understand words that might be uncommon in their lexicon.

I looked up this story and of course it happened in the U.S.A.

Verily, what is with the U.S.A.-man's unparalleled ability to be offended by a word, or any word phonetically similar, regardless of the context? — I am really quite glad I do not live there. It seems stressful to be able to loose one's profession so quickly over it's infamous “cancel culture”.

I also heard about a problem with a chat platform that kicked german users for using the common word "weniger" ("less"/"fewer"). Meaning not only didn't it care about context, it even banned incorrect spelling of words, which in this example made it impossible to mention the Republic of the Niger.

On another one, someone with the name “Hui” couldn't even post anything, because apparently it's a romanization of a Russian profanity and they had applied a global filter which would surely leave out quite a bit.

Or the online palæontological conference where the word “bone” was filtered...

How can one ever think such blanket filters will not go awry.

Will they be able to talk about tardigrades during biology class?

The fact that you have to say "r-word" instead of "retarded" is embarrassing.

Suggesting and weighing/voting on investment strategies in the open seems like the opposite of fraud.

There is nothing wrong with the word retard. It’s a legitimate dictionary word. Every few years the PC police has to arbitrarily decide that something is morally unfashionable and then they convince everyone that if they don’t replace it with an equivalent string, they’re somehow bad people. It makes no sense and everyone goes along with it. Whatever the current replacement is, that will probably be disallowed in a few years too. There’s nothing “not nice” about directing it toward one’s self as a joke. It’s not like they’re using it to bully a disabled person. People who can even afford the bandwidth to complain and choose that hill to die on have far too few problems in their life.

> There is nothing wrong with the word retard.

Well, sure, in that it's a word with lots of nonproblematic uses.

> It’s a legitimate dictionary word.

This implies probably a more normative role for dictionaries than is appropriate, but, sure, it is. However, as a noun applied to people (as distinct from the verb meaning “to slow down” or the noun meaning “a slowing down”) it’s one which every dictionary I can find flags explicitly as “offensive”, so insofar as one uses dictionaries as arbiters of usage, I think there clearly is a problem with the use of “retards” in question.

Maybe I’m a bad person, but this is my take. If someone uses the r word once in a while. Like it slips out when High school slang mode kicks in, I’m Okay. If it’s someone’s go to word, I feel that person is on the uncouth side of things. I’m not going to report someone to HR over it, or terminate a friendship, but I may minimize interaction with them.

But that goes for all excess vulgarity not just the r word. It’s not that I’m offended, but it’s a personal taste for less crassness.

Can you see how rtard is perhaps similar to the homophobic f-slur? The word is used as a pejorative with the implication that the group it is most commonly used towards (disabled, gay) is being used as a point of negative comparison. While I think we should be aware that the use of language is incredibly context-rich, we also need to recognise that the words we use have side-effects. Would you feel comfortable if a friend of yours dropped something and said "oh damn, I'm such a <n-word>"?

Speaking of the f-word, I’ve seen it used non pejoratively at the embarcadero farmers’s market. One of the vendors sells them for home decorative purposes along with cattails, lavender, etc.

Being from the UK, I hear it all the time to refer to cigarettes. When I worked in a shop, my colleagues would just walk through the shop and say "just taking a f* break". While it was totally inoffensive, it did make me a bit uncomfortable. Piquing my sjw sensitivities, I guess

Just to clarify for people outside the UK, this refers to the three-letter variation.

Yes but that's nothing to do with homosexuals? Why is there any relation.

There isn't any relation other than the word being used. It's not something I ever complained about because I understood that it wasn't offensive in any way and is, like I said, just the response I have to hearing that word.

Personally I find it disturbing that adults discussing the word feel the need to type things like “f-word” instead of just typing the word fag. You’re talking about a cigarette. It’s a configuration of 3 particular letters. There’s no reason to react to them in that context.

I will speak how I wish to my friends; nobody will ever dictate otherwise.

> nobody will ever dictate otherwise.

I wouldn’t be so sure.

I think there's a public/private divide here. You can use whatever language you want with people you know, because you know how they'll react and that it genuinely won't cause offence. In a public space though, I'd be wary. A black person walking past a group of white kids making racist jokes and using racial slurs is only going to make them feel less comfortable, even if the white kids genuinely mean no harm.

I think even if words like that aren't used to intentionally bully or harm someone, it certainly sets the tone of an environment. We all have to make the choice as individuals about what tone we want our words and actions to bring to the world around us.

Right, but that's the in-joke. People refer to themselves as mentally disabled. It does set the tone - namely, of leaving your ego at the door. I fail to see how this is a negative.

I mean, in a locker-room context, yeah, for sure, the externalities might be limited. At the same time, the comparison made there strikes as one oozing with value judgements. To be frank, I feel like the sentiments behind said value judgements would make the world a worse-off place.

I wouldn't want to contribute to a world where someone with mental disabilities feels like they're the indirect butt of someone else's joke. I feel like there's a way to be humble (and witty, likely!) without having to punch sideways.

> The mention fraud several times -but say it’s NOT because of fraud— but I almost receive a wink when they mention it like that.

Their full statement as quoted in the linked article denies that the ban is for "financial fraud" but includes "spreading misinformation" as one of the reasons for the ban. I don't see any contradiction or winking involved. People who repeatedly spread hate speech and discriminatory content and glorify violence after repeated warnings not to do so are pretty likely to be spreading a wide variety of misinformation other than financial fraud.

As for whether such things can be the reason to ban the server, I'm sure Discord's terms of service allow them to ban for this reason. Historically a lot of tech companies were hands-off in practice, but ever since the January 6 violence in the US and the related online activities, many of these companies would right now prefer to err in the opposite direction.

> People who repeatedly spread "hate speech" and "discriminatory content" and "glorify violence" after repeated warnings not to do so are pretty likely to be spreading a wide variety of "misinformation" other than financial fraud.

None of these things (in quotes) can even be defined, and anyone who believes that the government or some tech oligarch is going to be a fair judge must have been born yesterday. It's ridiculous how we can both simultaneously criticize countries like China, but at the same time encourage the exact same types of suppression in our own Westernized way.

There has never been either a legal or moral right in any tradition of freedom of speech throughout history, including the US tradition, to insist that other private parties who disagree with your speech continue to do business with you. The strong US freedom of speech protections are about government action only, and even those have exceptions. Every judgment of this sort has some subjectivity, and that's fine.

If someone dislikes Discord's judgment on that matter, they can switch providers or run their own service. If every viable provider stops dealing with them, that kind of implicit collective judgment and its consequences have always been part of humanity.

Also, most Western countries other than the US do have laws or judicial precedents which define terms like hate speech and provide penalties for engaging in it that are routinely adjudicated and enforced by courts. Even US judges consider hate speech as evidence an aggravating factor in how they handle crimes with hate as a motivation, accept the illegality of incitement to imminent violence, etc.

> There has never been either a legal or moral right in any tradition of freedom of speech throughout history, including the US tradition, to insist that other private parties who disagree with your speech continue to do business with you.

I don't care - there bloody well should be.

How would that work, practically? Let's say I prefer to get my hair cut by a barber that makes public statements in favor of gender equality instead of patronizing one that publicly advocates for the dynamics of Western society's traditional gender roles. For the sake of this scenario, let's say there's no other relevant difference between the two barbers, except where noted. Should my disfavored barber be able to insist that I shift some or all of my hair care business to them since the reason I'm not using them is their speech? How much of my business should they be able to force?

Would it be any different if I preferred the traditionalist and the one who wanted to force my business were the equality advocate? What if my preferred barber just stayed quiet and it were the one who vocally advocated either view who insisted on my business? What if the business terms of the barber with distasteful speech were worse, and how much worse would they need to be for that difference to outweigh their free speech rights?

None of this seems very plausible to enforce well.

More importantly, who would decide among all these possibilities? That's quite the power of imposing one's views (and financial policies) on others. I'm not sure I trust any government or private regulatory authority with that much control over private lives and livelihoods.

A "moral right" would be easy to enforce. Everyone just thinks less of people who mix politics and business.

But that's the thing - not everyone does think less of such people, under the view that only people with privilege can even have the luxury of tuning out the impact of politics on their lives at work, since marginalized colleagues still suffer the impacts of politics daily at the office (or indirectly elsewhere in ways attributable to the actions and inactions of their employer) and they shouldn't be blamed for mixing politics and business when they speak up about it. I realize that's not your view, but it's a plenty common view.

Further, not everyone who wants to keep politics and business separate even agrees on what mixing politics and business means.

Is it politics for a company to go out of its way to make bathrooms explicitly gender-neutral, put pronouns in staff directories, encourage even people who are not trans to indicate their pronouns so that trans people don't feel singled out by doing so, discipline people for persistent or intentional use of the wrong pronouns in the workplace, and cover common trans needs like hormone replacement therapy in the company health insurance plan?

Many people on the right of the US political spectrum would call that politics. Many other people conclude that some good workers happen to be trans and would feel more comfortable working at such employers than at ones with traditional attitudes toward them, meaning that these changes have the apolitical good business consequence of maximizing the ability of the company to attract and retain workers.

Does one have to inquire into the motivation of the employer for adopting these policies to decide if they're mixing politics or business, or just engaging in business?

Lots of subjectivity even on moral rights questions like this.

Though, I will say that my use of the word "enforce" is really only applicable to legal rights, not moral rights, outside of some kind of dystopian enforcement of what people are allowed to think.

So this is fine, but gay wedding cakes aren't?

The problem with modern leftism is consistency in beliefs. It's why I had to just walk away despite still agreeing with most leftist policy ideas.

If you're referring to the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case, it wasn't about free speech rights at all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colo...

Both sides of that case agreed that the company was choosing to deny its custom wedding cake services to a gay wedding because of the owner's religious beliefs against gay weddings, not because of anyone's speech. In other words, they objected to making a wedding cake because of attributes inherent to who the engaged couple were, not anything that was being said or expressed.

I view it as plenty consistent to forbid businesses which serve the public from choosing not to serve customers based on innate aspects of who they are, like being the same sex or gender as each other, while still allowing them to make such choices in reaction to the customer's speech. Sometimes the line is clear (no speech was at issue in this case), and sometimes it's blurry, but that's absolutely a consistent rule whether or not it's the one you support.

The reason the Supreme Court ruled for the bakeshop was very narrow. The ruling acknowledged that states can constitutionally have non-discrimination laws that apply neutrally to businesses without making available exemptions due to religious beliefs. The ruling was just about the behavior of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in applying their state law to this case, which the Supreme Court majority viewers as hostile to the owner's religious beliefs and not religiously neutral as the government must be. So it was about religious bias in the government action, only. One member of the 5-4 majority wrote that he might well have ruled the other way had the commission acted neutrally.

It's still a free speech issue when the cakeshop did not want to write the message the customer asked for.

FWIW I also disagree with the ruling, for the same reasons I oppose online censorship by private companies.

The concern expressed by the cakeshop was primarily about making a custom wedding cake for a gay wedding, not the message. Put differently, they wouldn't have made a custom cake for this particular wedding, knowing it was a gay wedding, even if there were no message requested. The ruling was not on free speech grounds.

Anyway, the cakeshop scenario is a bit different in another way: it can be argued to involve expressive activity on the part of the employees who create the custom cake, since it's far more artistic than mechanical, and since they do literally write any requested message with decoration. By contrast, Discord's actions against the customer are simply a choice of which speech by others they choose to allow to flow through the platform they control, plus a statement of their own speech which they choose to put out about their action.

(For what it's worth, they've chosen to partially reverse their ban since we started out discussion, if I understand right.)

If you want to ensure there is a content neutral platform, maybe the best way (at least under US free speech concepts) is to advocate for a government-owned/run Internet group communication platform, just like we have in offline life when you go to the nearby park or plaza to protest, or when you send mail to everyone in your local community through USPS.

Everyone agrees that, in the US, the government can't constitutionally censor that on the basis of content or viewpoint, with a few exceptions such as forbidding child pornography. I'm guessing that platform wouldn't keep getting funding from the politicians if it got too much offensive content, but if it wasn't shut down entirely, they couldn't be selective about which speech to permit.

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