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Comment by purple-leafy | Hacker News Reader

Moderation moderation moderation . It’s a big problem

I have similar moderation concerns in my browser game/engine but I only ban offensive slurs not swears, but I give no visual affordance that the word is not allowed

The only surface where players see the input content is in a share card, and if they finish a game and get to the share card they will find the offensive word has been REDACTED lol

So it’s a long feedback loop just to find out your hijinks lead nowhere

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What is the difference between slurs and swears?

Slurs are targeted towards specific groups of people (or I guess just anyone? "Clanker" is considered a slur, and you can probably come up with plenty of slurs for animals, they just won't be considered offensive and socially unacceptable like the ones for humans)

…or you could just let people talk? People who engage with social features generally do so because they want to talk to other people. That carries some inherent risks.

Nah, drive those horrible people out of social spaces. I want to talk to other people without racist assholes bumbling around.

Being a racist asshole carries some inherent risks too, like people choosing not to let you enter their spaces.

more than anything it’s just signal to noise ratios.

i’m so sick of people just adding dipshit noise to every single place they can and making it impossible to have normal ass conversation.

at the end of the day, these people need to realize the simple shit we realize in like 1st grade: if you’re an asshole to everyone around you, no one will want to be around you.

it really is that simple. but for some reason some of these people struggle to understand basic ass things little kids learn easily.

Unlike a playground assholes on the internet realize a couple things:

1. Theres a near endless supply of assholes

2. If youre loud enough and an asshole enough you'll find other assholes.

3. Your new found group of assholes can then go off and terrorize other people while attracting more assholes.

In a small local scene with several whatsapp groups, I put "don't be an edgelord" as a catch-all rule rule when I started a discord in the community.

Lo and behold, the EXACT person I had in mind when making the rule, moaned about it.

Works as intended.

No? Especially not in my case where it’s a share artefact that is intended to be shared with others on various platforms.

Having my game aesthetic + slur on a sharing artefact is a great way for people to think my game encourages that crap and to “cancel” the game.

Not that I agree with, or care about, cancel culture - but I don’t want people in general associating my game with slurs.

I’m all for swearing and saying funny things that are not pc, but I draw the line at harmful offensive content.

Do what you wish but do no harm unto others.

I get the desire to moderate your game, but how are words 'harmful' exactly? Especially random, throwaway internet spew. Harmful to your game's reputation, maybe. But to the people?

Clearly you haven't been exposed to much of the underbelly of the internet. Words can translate to physical harm and actions in the real world, and do regularly

This sounds like a disingenuous argument to actually try to argue for more racism. Every kid in the world has been called stupid by a classmate and knows that words aren't meaningless.

Who said that words are meaningless?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48620564

>> if words had no power, we wouldn’t fight so hard to protect them from government abuse.

>People fight hard for all kinds of nonsense.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/nonsense

I think you've failed to understand the words in question, rather than them being meaningless

I think you're a troll who should be banned from this site for wasting everyone's time.

Hm, can't really have engaging discussions with people who just don't understand what's being said. Can't force the information into their brains so we can do that either. Not sure which action you'd like me to take to improve this situation, then.

I grew up on the internet, I doubt there's any level of textual depravity I haven't seen.

[flagged]

> call your wife a fat sow everyday in earnest for a year and see if she isn’t granted a divorce for maltreatment.

Is this an appeal to the law or something? It's not a very good argument. Many things which are harmful are not illegal. Many things which are illegal are not harmful.

Also, that's not even how divorce works!

> no one is claiming words are physically harmful

"speech is violence" is a position that some people hold.

> if words had no power, we wouldn’t fight so hard to protect them from government abuse.

People fight hard for all kinds of nonsense. Historically, people have fought hard for things that didn't matter at all.

The demo widget right now is botted with people spamming nonsense to the point of breaking browsers, much less the intended use. "let people talk" is not the same as "give disruptive people the tools to prevent others from talking"

when I entered site, all bubbles contained dicks/balls and combination of these... so... someone found words that are not banned, but still abused forum in most primitive way ..

you're wrong, moderation is needed in ventures like this

Yea I think this was somewhat true back in 2001. With bots composing half the traffic of the internet, governments controlling massive social botnets and the polarization of politics everywhere, the internet became a full scale spam/hate fest

I don't think horrible people (eg racist, xenophobic, bigots) have the right to share space with good, kind people.

They have the privilege they forfeit the moment they try to hurt others. If they don't behave like cunts I don't care, but if they do, I'll use any tool I have at my disposal to bar them from the space they don't respect. They can talk to their kind in the nasty spaces anyway, so it's not like they're in the solitary confinement.

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