Let me be the first to bring Jung into this, "What you resist, persists", in trying to avoid the usage of slurs, you had to go and commit them to a public branch of source code to be saved in the arctic vault for eternity.
Funny enough I went to a Krautrock mini-festival a few weeks ago, here in Germany. Nobody I know cares about the term "kraut". At this point it is just outdated WW2 lingo that never caught on here.
I feel like "Kartoffel" is often used in a more offensive way. Although I've never really seen someone getting really offended.
I think that is one group of people where English-based slurs haven't stuck. But on the other hand the languages around Germany have still plenty of slurs for Germans, which funnily won't be caught by the bluesky filter.
It's supposedly used by neighbor countries and foreigners to refer to Germans. But it's common to see people of other areas using potato-related slurs against Irish and Russians too.
I don’t know why an array in source code would imply an ordering to you; it’s much more likely the author just picked a a list online.
Note that this list also contains several terms that are either reappropriations or contextual uses, and only applies to usernames. This is more or less what any social media network of a nontrivial size does.
They're on the same level insofar as it's been deemed serious enough by someone to put on this list. Just funny to see it on a list filled with ethnic slurs and a couple disability slurs, looks very out of place to see an extremely-online insult alongside slurs with tons of historical baggage.
Does it really surprise you to see an extremely-online insult being included in a black list for an app for extremely-online people? I genuinely can't understand the confusion.
Isn't a blacklist typically a bad idea for all of the reasons people are listing in the comments (like scunthorpe)? I've never implemented a social media platform, but why would you use a blacklist as opposed to a flagging system with manual moderation (where maybe the flagged user gets sent to a quarantine where they're shadow banned until approval)? That way, as language evolves and new slurs are made, or somebody tries to circumvent the system, you can just manually ban that user. Is there a technical reason this is a bad idea?
It’s one layer of mitigation that makes some users very happy. Potentially there should be some kind of AI detection here instead but people haven’t thought to do that yet.
Manual flagging is probably how the user got found but since it’s too “obvious” that it’s an issue with certain words, it makes users upset.
I think that the reappropriation of slurs, like yankee, whig, tory, queer, etc., is a positive thing. But this practice serves to lock them in place, helping to insure that they remain slurs.
This is proof that vampires are real and they walk among us. You need to prune slurs more than two centuries old. Otherwise the mortals will catch on to you.
Context: Yesterday a user created a Bluesky account using the N-word as their handle and, unsurprisingly, people were not happy and there was clamor for the Bluesky dev team to add a filter at the account creation level.
At least they don’t have Guido in it… yet. I have major problems signing up for services these days. There’s some list out there that programmers use that says that my name is a slur.
The name was so popular in Italy it ended up becoming a “slur” (though personally the only time I’ve ever heard someone called Guido is when that was their name). I wonder if that will ever happen with other languages and their common names, I’m Russian so I immediately think of “Sergey” as one of our ultra common names.
Some slurs have large organizations behind them telling people they need to be mad. Others don't, and people end up not caring. My background is split 50/50 and both of them have common slurs associated with them. Nobody in my family cares cares, including me.
You might want to actually read that wikipedia post.....
"The slang term Guido is used in American culture to refer derogatorily to an urban working-class Italian or Italian-American male who is overly aggressive or macho with a tendency for certain conspicuous behavior.[3] It may also be used as a more general ethnic slur for working-class urban Italian Americans.[4]"
Okay? Strawman much? I'm not arguing that anyone do anything about it. I'm just telling you objectively what it is. The Wikipedia article YOU cited disagrees with you...
I hope they have fewer typos in their slur list than in their code comments :)
I started reading the list from the bottom up, and saw the N word written with a W a first letter. I first thought they were going to do a .replace("W", "N") to avoid spelling the word in plain text.
They'll have issues once github bans slurs from source code! ;)
This is so laughable, like these pajeets think that blocking the word golliwog on their so called open protocol of future communication will stop it from turning into a cheap 4chan clone
The solution to slurs and insults is always to let them speak and let them be ridiculed, not arbitrary censorship that will never be effective other than to give the platform a veneer of "we've done something" credibility
Yes, but they're currently prefederation (can't run your own instance yet) and still making architectural decisions about how moderation will work.
they're balancing onboarding new users with keeping up with high expectations of their current userbase. I'm not sure how the federation story compares with mastadon, I've mostly heard talk of composite block lists (everyone you block is public on bluesky so you could have rules that say block everyone that x,y,z have blocked, minus people I follow)
Yes, but since they’re by far the largest instance right now and would prob degenerate with you, you’d need to be cool with the fact that only people on your instance and some small other ones would be able to see your posts.
Pretty much. To clarify, Bluesky is a client that uses the AT Protocol. The instance that Bluesky the client uses is bsky.app, but anyone can create their own instance that doesn't refer to this slur list when someone creates an account.
What'll happen though is that the bsky.app instance (which is the largest one and basically the flagship right now) will probably de-federate with instances that have usernames that include those slurs.
It’s strange to me that the block is username specific. Having it in your username seems like you’re self identifying as such, potentially owning it and “taking it back”.
Like I guess your username could be “BobHates<Slur>s” but that just self identifies you as an idiot.
They are missing the T word, the F word, the D word, the S word, and the M word. Now obviously only some of those are racial slurs but I think keeping this in the code base rather than a database is definitely asking for issues
> T word, the F word, the D word, the S word, and the M word
God, this is so childish. Perhaps you think that list should also only list words as "f-word" and have software interpret what it refers to so as not to offend anyone reading the code.
Funny anecdote about this: in the podcast "Blocked and Reported" one of the presenters tells a story she heard from a mother. Her child learned in school that "under no circumstance is it okay to say the n-word because it's the most vile, horrible, unforgivable thing anyone can say". The kid is 7 years old (or about that age) and has no idea what the n-word is so he asks the teacher. But the teacher refuses to say it because she's bound by her own logic of "under no circumstance" so kid is has no idea which of the many words beginning with n he's not supposed to say.
I also have a funny anecdote: I made a comment in Hacker News saying a list of slurs was incomplete and only mentioning the initial letters of a few slur words not everyone understood me.
The point of not mentioning a full word was because for a slur to be a slur it needs to be in a shared context. Otherwise maybe it's just a shortened version of Michael or an embankment used to prevent flooding. The child in your anecdote is a perfect example of that. Thank you.
Thanks, albeit I was tongue-in-cheek, I was thinking F-word woukd be fuck, and all the other blew over my head. I couldn't understand why they would censor fuck in a nickname.
Slur blacklists have a problem with different languages.
Was actually thinking Dyke, Seppo, and Mick to keep with the theme of slurs against groups of people. (Slut is obviously a slur as well but I think dick and motherfucker are just insults...
My grandmother could have made a killing as a consultant on this kind of thing with her extensive domain expertise, although I’m not sure how much Bluesky is interested in slurs for those English people across the river.
Let me be the first to bring Jung into this, "What you resist, persists", in trying to avoid the usage of slurs, you had to go and commit them to a public branch of source code to be saved in the arctic vault for eternity.