I modded a niche outdoor community sub and I banned every bot that found its way there. Sorry, but we don't need a metric conversion bot nor a grammar correcting bot.
There was one for a while that told you how many times you left a comment saying "nice." It had a leaderboard and the top ones had done it some tens of thousands of times.
That's a path to inequality, not equality. Trying to silence people because you don't like certain words is a bit of fascism in itself, which these people claim to be against.
Telling people not to use a word, whatever might be said about it being a good idea or not, is not fascism. "Fascism" is a specific social phenomenon that has emerged from the decay of capitalism as reactionary popular movements that seek to offload their poverty onto social minorities. "Taboo words" have existed for about as long as language has existed for an endless variety of reasons. Whether having some words be taboo is good or bad, calling it fascism is completely ridiculous.
Isn't that just a fact? Like, I get why words such as "removed" should be avoided due to it being an insult et all, but wheelchair bound?
English is a funny language so I might be missing something.
It is a foolish path, but to call it "oppressive" is to tip your hand that you have no real notion of what oppression is if you're worried about what amounts to a slightly different set of etiquette on a semi-anonymous internet forum.
This isn't just a problem on the internet. I run into people in real life who think this way, often.
How many times have comedians or other entertainers come under fire for jokes or other bits they've done? It's a lot. Comedians will all tell you that they can't perform in places like New York the same way anymore, because half the things they say get booed from the crowd.
"Why should I care about Dave Chappelle, or anyone else, getting slammed for some offensive thing they said?"
Because entertainer's acts are one of the ways that people come to understand the world around them. Their satire is an important tool for democracy to unravel the bullshit that surrounds them. It's supposed to be the opposite of sterile.
And if "dirty language" means that you're okay silencing those guys, along with everyone else, you are engaging in oppression on a far wider scale than you realize.
Blind to ____ / turn a blind eye to ____ / blinded by ignorance/bigotry/etc. / double-blind review
Refers to Blind, low-vision, or sight-limited people. Often used as a metaphor.
Consider instead: willfully ignorant, deliberately ignoring, turning their back on, overcome by prejudice, doubly anonymous, had every reason to know, feigned ignorance
I suspect if you are trying to build an inclusive community but don't have a lot of diversity already, the only thing you can really do to change the culture is to remind people to be considerate in the way they speak. And if most people who would be offended aren't actually part of the community (but you would like them to feel welcome to join), then you might want some bot rather than a person to be the “narc” and remind people to be on their best behavior. So I guess if the mods are the only ones who want to be nice, then yes, it is a bit ridiculous because it will never work. Even if people change their language, they won't be nice. But if most people want things to change, it could be a helpful way to both remind you to be inclusive and get the few people who would rather talk about how having to say bartender is censorship (without actually defending why they want to make a point of saying “barmen”) to realize that they either have to change the way they talk in that particular community or find a better fit.
The problem with forcing uniform speechis it stifles debate and discussion. It makes everything Disney-esque.
It's also very Amero-centric. "Fag" and "faggot" in British English have different meanings (cigarette and food type) to US English (gay). The equivalent of "retard" is proably "spastic". The word "nigger" doesn't have as big a taboo in the UK as it does in the US. An equivalent here would probably be "Paki". Yet Reddit will delete and ban you for using th US english words but not the Brit-English ones.
It's why you end up with idiots claiming you should say "Latinx" instead of "Latino" because it's gendered.
You also end up with idiotic self-censoring by people saying "unalive" instead of suicide. It becomes comical that you're basically translating all this bullshit flowery language in your head to normal speech.
"I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality".
I'm Therevadan Buddhist but have studied quite a bit of Zen and there's an idea within Zen to break down the abstraction layer that language places on the world to get to REALITY. Doing this helps you see reality for what it is.
What I see Reddit's language sanitisation as is placing further abstraction on top oof what's already abstract.