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Comment by benbristow | Hacker News Reader

"ReadMe has made our lives infinitely easier. We've had it on our todo list for over a year, and a day after finding ReadMe we had our docs launched. We're super impressed. You guys have built a fucking awesome tool."

I don't know, but having swearing on a professional website is probably not the best way to go. Looks like a nice startup though.

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We debated about this a lot. Jesse wrote to us via our Olark plugin, so there was a back-and-forth – he didn't just start swearing. He was one of our first customers, and having someone we didn't know love our product was awesome.

We liked how enthusiastic and genuine it sounded, and I've personally never liked when people type "f*cking" (we're all adults; that asterisk isn't tricking anyone.). But alas, we've removed it for now :)

    I usually type fuck*ng or m*therfucking.

EDIT: OH MY GOD HOW DO YOU TYPE A FUCKING ASTERISK

If you only have a single aster*sk in your comment, it doesn't get converted to an emphasis.

Could've changed it to "friggin'" for the PC folk who get appalled by casualness. That's what I usually do when I'm unsure of how stiff is the other party.

I'm not in any way opposed to vulgarity in general, but I have to admit that this stuck out to me too. Not really necessary.

(Though my first thought wasn't "Who puts 'fucking' in their testimonials section," it was "Who puts 'fucking' in a business email to a new vendor?")

It's a word. Specifically, its a word indicating magnitude. I'm not bothered by such words.

to be fair the people who get appalled by reading the f-word are probably not the target customer. who drops f-word all the time? programmers, entrepreneurs, designers, developers, managers. certainly not established 100 year old corporation, but most certainly the hip, fast moving, horny, 20~30 something olds who eat and breathe technology.

Personally I find the "hip" use of curse words a red flag for working with a company.

If you can't even be professional on your external-facing site, it's a certainty that I'll have to put up with much worse unprofessionalism in our closer business relationship.

But that's just me, and I don't pretend to be in the majority among the HN/reddit crowd.

More like insecure, inarticulate brogrammers who are getting burnt out overworking but think it's cool. I don't find swearing to be a conducive way of creating an inclusive, thoughtful work environment. I had enough of this fucking bullshit in college. Time to grow the fuck up.

Now that I re-read my comment, what I actually meant to say is - I had enough bravado swearing by young people in college, and it is time to grow up and act professionally - but now I realize the comment can be read to mean that I had enough of non-swearing PC behavior in college, and it's ok to swear as an adult at work. Interestingly; I stay at an equilibrium of points after roughly equal upvotes and downvotes. I wonder if it would've swung -- or ++ if the meaning was universally conveyed correctly by me.

Okay now I can't tell if you're serious due to the last two fucking sentences.

Genuinely curious if your comment is meant to be ironic?

Hey, I'm one of those, I think! For me, dropping a few in a conversation is one thing. Seeing it chiseled onto a web page is quite another.

Agreed. Would you want to see that your doctor's written stuff like that in your chart (e.g., "Patient's got some really fucking bad gout!")? No? Then maybe it's unprofessional.

I'm pretty sure comparing the addition of 'fucking' as a crass emphasis on the seriousness of someone's medical condition, with saying it excitedly when happy about a product or service you're enjoying, is drawing a flagrantly false equivalence. But heck (fuck?), that's just a reasoned, logical, non-PC take on this - three things that are sadly absent from much of the population these days.

Okay. "Patient's cancer is in fucking remission!", said excitedly and happily is nevertheless possibly indicative of generally unprofessional behavior, which was quite obviously the point. But I guess discussions bereft of pedantry and hubris are sadly absent among the HN population these days.

None of us is personally offended by this language. We simply understand that it has no place in professional communications, because it can only really harm perception vis-a-vis just leaving it out and so probably isn't a smart business move.

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