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Comment by ufmace | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think your characterization of the conversation is fair.

You're free to think so. I for one don't care to censor those who disagree with me. Note that there's a number of deleted comments, and neither of us know what those say.

> anyone who doesn't agree is free to go somewhere else

Fair enough, and I just said above that that's exactly what I intend to do.

I think it needs to be remembered here that their project is attempting to build a forum hosting tool, not a particular forum. If a particular forum intends to censor any slur list they choose, I have no issue with that, that's entirely their right, and I'll post on it or not. But I feel it's highly inappropriate for a team building a hosting tool to impose a particular chosen slur list on anyone using their tool to host a forum, with no regard to what the purpose or character of that forum is intended to be. I shall indeed choose not to use such a tool.

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>Note that there's a number of deleted comments, and neither of us know what those say

Does that mean you get to just create a narrative? Dessalines is the closest in that thread with telling people they can use voat or gab if they want to use slurs, which at least implies some racism but that other dev Nutomic has a pretty inoffensive stance when he says

>If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.

>Does that mean you get to just create a narrative?

Eh? GP was pretty clear in showing that the developers of the project are pro-censorship, not only in hard-coding in naive badword filters, but also in how they handle responses to requests on their own project

>Dessalines is the closest in that thread with telling people they can use voat or gab if they want to use slurs, which at least implies some racism

There is no "some" in their statement. They are saying that if you have a problem with blanket-filtering language, then that means that you want to use words that are designated as bad, and that only bad people use those words. It's purely black-and-white. Nobody could ever want to use those words in any other context, according to them

>that other dev Nutomic has a pretty inoffensive stance when he says "If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter."

On the contrary, saying that anyone who disagrees with you is a "bother" is offensive, especially if you flip-flop on your position and plug the change in anyways, which is what they did

The user I was replying to dropped this as a quote when describing what the devs were saying.

> Screw you racist, we're never going to remove it

That's creating a narrative, it was never said.

>On the contrary, saying that anyone who disagrees with you is a "bother" is offensive, especially if you flip-flop on your position and plug the change in anyways, which is what they did

Literally anytime you talk to someone and they don't want you to, that's bothering them. There's a discussion to be had if its reasonable to be bothered by the behavior, but whether or not its is bothering someone is literally defined by that person's belief.

On that note, if you find what Nutomic said offensive, I think thats a little too trigger happy on being offended.

>Nobody could ever want to use those words in any other context, according to them

In what context would you want to write out a slur against someone as part of some online discussion? Even if you were quoting some external source, you could just censor the slur/hate speech, and still carry on with the discussion.

> In what context would you want to write out a slur against someone

There are other contexts than using a slur against someone. For example, describing an instance where a slur was used against you personally, explaining historical contexts of the slur, and so on. The existence of a slur does not mean that it's only ever going to be used in cases where it's being thrown at someone else

Right but in the example you use you could write sl*r or sl-r instead of slur and anyone reading would understand you and you would get past the filter.

No, you couldn't. For example, if you were teaching someone who's learning English about which words to avoid, they wouldn't know which words you're talking about since you're not actually using them

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