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Comment by _Algernon_ | Hacker News Reader

You do realize that censoring a word in such a way as to not hide what the term is makes no difference? Not to single you out or anything, I see it a lot, but I am curious what you think it accomplishes.

Edit: Rephrased more politely.

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For the same reason people online don't write "sex". To bypass overzealous contentfilters but keep it humanly readable.

Yeah many games now will block words even containing 'ass'. And they just do a complete substring search, so any of the totally normal words that happen to contain a s s are censored. I don't know why, but its so common that people will just censor themselves preemptively

I once read an article (probably on here) where a developer started tokenizing language into phonemes and then matching those against a list of verboten sounds. This prevented people (students?) from getting around literal filters. Basically hashing for English, where words like phat and 1337 could be matched. It always seemed like such an elegant and effective solution to a human vs computer problem. It would make a great library.

Why do we need to prevent people from expressing themselves? Why do we need to encourage such self-censorship as evident here? Why would the existence of such a library be a good thing?

Language is contextual. The use of certain terms is rude in some contexts, not in others. An algorithm will never be able to distinguish the two without being an AGI.

The only thing this encourages is self-censorship and dampening of expression.

The irony is that slurs gain their potency from their novelty which is emboldened by censorship and hindered by exposure. If taboo language was used freely and often, it would lose its shock value and subsequently its power to harm people sensitive to it.

I see it most often in YouTube videos where they’ll demonetize your video if you use any “bad” words.

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