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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why so many people here are self-censoring their replies. You're allowed to swear on HN, and sw__ring while removing one or two letters just looks ridiculous.

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Some people get offended. There's probably a significant number of religious developers, for example. I've worked with quite a few, even if I'm not one myself.

I am personally fine with vulgarity, but I censor myself to not make some others feel uncomfortable.

Some others have attached things to foul language such as a class or intelligence assignation, which is of course judgmental, but it is what it is. I have a very funny (and eminently classy) friend who almost never uses vulgarity. He doesn't judge me when I do (I'm a USAF vet, it comes with the territory lol) but I couldn't help noticing that he never uses it.

Understandable, but if I'm around such a person I just don't drop swear words into my conversation, as opposed to dropping them but then editing them. If someone is offended by the word 'fuck' I assume they would still feel offended by 'f_ck'.

Just because you are allowed to swear doesn't mean you should do it.

Omitting a letter doesn't make any difference, you still wrote it and people read it and heard it in their head. It's just a way of pretending you didn't.

If you're going to censor and still want to swear, just mince your oaths.

Gosh darn it, it's not that fricking hard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath

When I put in my own jailbreak “Andrew Dice Clay mode”, ChatGPT censored “c*cksucker”.

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