Discord would claim its “hateful and discriminatory content” for anything in the fucked up reality we are currently living in. For instance, if you call someone retarded and a mod doesn't step in, that is considered hateful. Even though retard is in the dictionary and a widely accepted term by many people. Then saying that only retards buy the shit hedgefunds are peddling would also be considered discriminatory. I'm tired of this fucking bullshit and ready to go thru as many proxy accounts as needed to get my point across. Discord needs to go out of business or grow some balls. Everything in this world could be construed into being hateful or discriminatory if you stretch enough.
Discord isn't on your side. They're an unprofitable (so far) VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client. They're clearly trying to build a platform for PR- and ad-friendly discourse. Nobody should be surprised when weirdos get the ban.
They have expenses, but they also have a rapidly growing (YoY) revenue source. I didn't think I'd need to point out all the pieces of the puzzle.
I'm tired of getting downvoted with every post I make. I can understand when I defend freedom of speech or attack Apple or Google or China that I offend people, but it's happening all the time on totally benign posts.
It's making me cynical about the community. HN is great for information discovery and diversity of experience, but it feels like people are becoming increasingly vicious.
Showing the trademark of a technology they are using in the product, for the purposes of identification of said technology does not count as advertising. According to your reasoning, they would have to say "we use some other company's noise reduction". And no, the chat view (or the voice chat view) does not show the Krisp logo continuously.
They showed the trademark very prominently and that must be because they had a deal. We give you noise reduction, you give us visibility. That is an advertising contract.
Their place, their rules. I see the continuing belief you can do anything on somebody’s else turf. Wallstreet bets could pretty much move to 4chan if they value their 4chan behavior this greatly.
But you are both right. Ever had a good free debate about anything when the other side of the debate held their ears and screamed their opinion full blast?
The best and most free debates I ever had happened in environments where I knew that I was allowed to be wrong without them holding it against me.
As a European I always thought free speech was very much an American thing. In the past years I realised that debates are lead much more freely here than in the US, because your debates constantly go onto a red vs blue track. That means speakers have to reflect that constantly and signal to everybody else where they stand and which team they like.
The truth is, both environment factors into free speech and every society has to strike a balance.
> The truth is, both environment factors into free speech and every society has to strike a balance.
This, I agree with. But the point I'm trying to make is that this cuts both ways. Alice has every right to make her point however she wants. Bob also has every right to not lend her his resources to amplify that. Charlie has a right to criticize Bob for denying resources, etc etc.
I note that the shoe never seems to be on the other foot — e.g., the crowd that gets angry about Discord banning hate speech is curiously quiet about the chilling effect white nationalist rallies have on people of color.
I agree with what you say. If you look atthe parent comments, they both go to extremes to make a point. A big problem when it comes to discussion, is coming in with an attitude that your view is “right” and soapboxing it to the world. In any discussion their should be room for shades of grey and the respect to listen to different and (in your eyes) descending views.
How you communicate is just as important as what you wish to communicate.
Exactly. Especially when we talk about freedoms and rights it is important to recognize the collision space between the different freedoms/rights of individuals.
If one exercises their freedom of speech in certain ways one might impede the freedom of speech of others (e.g. who are objectively less free). This is one of the big differences between Europe and the US: in the US the freedom of speech of the individual (regardless of the collisions with others) is traditionally valued more, than a collective, utlitarian definition of freedom of speech which is more present in Europe.
Utilitarian freedom of speech would mean that we try to optimized for a society where everybody can speak freely even if this means cutting of some individuals that go to extremes.
Individual freedom of speech means you let everybody say what they wanna say, even if it means that the discourse of the society as a whole gets harder, muffled or destroyed.
I don't say any one of those things is better, but both have their pros and cons and we certainly need to be aware of the downsides and complexities involved when we ask ourselves what society we want to live in.
I don't think it's this simple. That interpretation of freedom of speech seems a bit literal. The point is that people should have the ability to voice their opinions, and have their voice heard if anyone wants to hear it. Since today that's done primarily through social media sites, blogs, and videos, preventing people from using those mediums is limiting their freedom of speech.
And of course I'm not saying there aren't limits to freedom of speech. There are legitimate limits. But a social media company deciding they don't want you on their platform anymore without any due process seems wrong.
I just don't buy the overly literal "this is private property and I get to decide what you're allowed to say here", when that private property is our primary medium for communication.
I agree with that in the same way that I agree with strong anti-monopolistic laws, and with the expanded understanding of de-facto monopoly where (for example) Apple/iOS is one despite billions of Android devices.
But I do not think Discord is at that level yet, while Facebook, Twitter and YouTube most definitely are.
All you can reasonably ask a normal company is that they do not act to harm society in their pursuit of profit. And they may argue that they believe the dynamic of WSB is harmful to society. I think that position in this case and for WSB is defensible, and I am yet undecided personally if I actually agree with it or not. (I do believe that WSB may grow to become clearly harmful, but I'm not sure they're there yet)
Not sure. Back in the day it was very common to buy space in a local newspaper and print messages there. The newspaper could (and would!) deny publication of auch messages arbitraily.
Living in Germany with laws that ban you from displaying Nazi insignia or spouting certain phrases in public, I don't really believe in the whole "if we ban a certain thing there is a slippery slope and suddenly everyhing is banned". German society more or less collectively decided that tolerance for the intolerant is stupid and did something about it.
This might seem a little extrem from an US perspective, but just like that the prudeness of US society seems extreme to us Europeans. You talk about freedom of speech and censor every female nipple there is? Really?
What we will and won't tolerate in public forums is a mirror of our respective societies and values. And there is always something we will have to ban or at least frown uppon. E.g. even in the US child molesters won't be very able to talk about how their believes are okay etc.
And because all out free speech is destructive we have to strike a balance somewhere inbetween disincentivising people who use free speech to get rid of it and not turning into thought police.
Seen from a German perspective the US is so polarized that the polarization alone disencourages most people from leading a free and meaningful discourse.
I don’t really get it. Why do we keep telling people that it is support worthy to engage in name calling? Is it alright to let kids call teachers names at school? “This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit!” Maybe that’s ok now since Trump made it acceptable but it certainly wasn’t considered to be appropriate for a long time. It’s not free speech, it’s derogatory speech (for either side of those comparisons). So what changed?
“Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.” -- Lenny Bruce
I've never really understood the drive to banish profanity or insults. The purpose of language is to communicate ideas and I see no reason why it should be unacceptable for someone to express their disapproval at a situation or individual in the succinct way that profanity provides.
If anything profanity is far more mundane than the kinds of words a particularly clever person can string together to convey a heinous idea.
> “Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government.” -- Lenny Bruce
That's a comedian being funny and cool. The right to say "fuck the government" isn't important. I'd rather keep the de facto right criticize the government substantively, which may de jure exist, but is drowned in the de facto drivel.
Profanity matters. It motivates people. Not everyone has the time to attend your 1 hour TED talk. You tell them “FUCK WALL STREET” and you got a crowd ready to take down the traders. Publishing a position paper on the potential negative impacts of naked short selling while taking into account the views and interests of all stake holders ... cool. But you’re not motivating people with that.
Yeah, that's the problem. Too many people swayed by cheap laughs and the thrill of anger. Thus the failed insurrection earlier this year. It's hard to predict what'll be fun this week.
> Not everyone has the time to attend your 1 hour TED talk.
I guess we should package up the science into more concise bits. How about 5 minutes instead of 1 hour?
lol you're saying that people stormed the capitol because of profanity?
This reminds me of a time shortly after 9/11 when an agitated old man chased my friend for a block while screaming "People like you caused 9/11" just because he stole a jack in the box mascot head car antenna topper.
> lol ... an agitated old man chased my friend for a block while screaming
On the second thought, this makes me sad. I hope someday I'll be an old man living among friends, instead of watching my neighborhood devolve. It's all perspective, of course. I've been the hipster, now I'm the gentrifier. Still, one can feel the pain of that old man.
Obviously, your choice of words becomes limited if you refrain from using offensive language. And given our predisposition towards rage and anger to give attention this seems like an important “tool” to have at your disposal.
But as the incentives stand right now, accepting this kind of behavior is likely to trigger a race to the bottom as more and more speech get’s radicalized (in either direction) as people realize it is more powerful and can grab people more easily. We see this in the republican party. We need to find stop lines for this madness and find a somewhat stable equilibrium. Some places might be overreaching in moderation but this is to be expected as it’s difficult to find the right line as we don’t really have an understanding of the “proper” balance yet.
And my point is really that I am not sure what triggered this need for redress in the first place. Why is it so important to use spiteful language now? Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place? Why should we support this shift?
> Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place?
Who is "we"? It was just some Discord server. No one forces you to be a part of it. And they're not even political. It's stock market, so obviously people will get emotional.
I was referring to the general attitude of one of the parent comments which was making a statement about supporting speech with derogatory terms on principle.
In this instance, I generally agree that I don’t think it is a prime example of things that need to be “shut down”. It’s probably a borderline case. But if discords terms of service disallow this type of language, I think it’s a good sign that they try to stand by it and apply it also to cases that are not clearly (also) politically motivated. If it’s about how to talk rather than what you say this is what you would expect to see.
All my comments point to this renegotiation of norms and obviously tough and contentious calls will have to be made.
I support that kind of speech. Not the teacher example, but if it happens in some voluntary gathering, I really can't see why not. Like I said, people sometimes get emotional and you can't expect from everyone to stay calm no matter what. It's better to vent frustrations with words than doing something stupid and irresponsible.
> Couldn’t we have stayed more civil in the first place?
I feel like there's a disconnect. Movies may not depict it so, but curses and profanity have always been a part of language. So the "shift" is happening in the opposite direction the way I see it.
I think your example highlights exactly what people are reacting to.
School is an environment where teachers have broad authority and try to use it to create a safe space to protect children from hurtful speech. Many people react strongly to the application of this power dynamic to adult interactions.
Derogatory speech has always been free speech, but the places where people speak are becoming more visible, and organizations are becoming more active in expanding safe spaces. Derogatory speech is probably the lowest it has ever been, but more heard than it has ever been, and more scrutinized than it has ever been.
So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders? Are you sure about that? To be honest, I don’t see it. If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms. The problem might be that they CAN’T but then it’s a problem of basic education and training rather than opposition.
And I would argue the reverse to your point regarding free speech. More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech. People are trying to justify more things and other people are pushing back trying to uphold formerly established civil norms about how to say or not to say things under free speech. It’s really a plot of irony.
The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes. It’s really difficult to make objective judgements on this matter (also for me).
> So the opposition of discord is a gang of wallstreet traders?
It was just in general, but even in this case, yes, there are two sides opposed to each other. One happens to be more influential, powerful and with more money behind it, and the underdog is the wallstreetbets people.
> If people comply with basic norms of decency they will get back on those platforms.
I guess so, but if you have thousands of people in a single server, it's virtually impossible to keep everyone calm, especially in situations such as this one, where large sums of money are involved. Also you'll have bad actors who are trying to make it look bad on purpose so they get shut down. This is Discord and people actually use this kind of tactics there.
> More and more words are being used under the banner of free speech.
Speaking strictly about the USA, this is just factually incorrect. Racism, homofobia etc. used to be fine not that long ago. And legally it's still protected under the 1A. But then it became socially unacceptable and from that point more and more speech started to become "not free". This year questioning the integrity of the elections became a fireable offense and as I found out today - anything offensive.
> The biggest irony of all is that the perspective on this matter is largely shaped by your political philosophy and whether you profit from these changes.
Regarding the profits, for sure, I imagine. But politically this is an apolitical "movement", you will find socialists, libertarians, nationalists and anything in between that support their efforts. I guess it really united people, in a way.
> This fucking imbecile wants me to do homework! Fuck that shit
This was always acceptable (and even common) as long as no teacher heard it. Not sure what Trump has to do with it. Maybe it is different in america, I hear that they are very puritan over there.
If you let people use their freedom of speech to be anti-free-speech we will end up with a society that does not have this freedom. This is the logic on why licenses like the GPL were created, restrict some freedoms in order to keep the rest.
discord is filled with 'snowflakes' (apologies if that seems insulting)
I'm only a sample of 1 but on IRC I never felt surrounded by trigger happy mods. on discord I got regularly kicked without notice for some not even heated argument.
if I extrapolate, this side of the web is becoming a way for people to craft tiny bubbles to fit their own little views on life.
Yeah it might be a matter of culture/maturity/experience. But so far the majority of servers I ended up on [1] were filled with people that had this mentality trait. It was unsettling.
[1] topics could be from science, to collapse, to dev ..
Any on-line venue is a place where mods and admins make the rules. You know them before going in. Their place, their rules. It’s the same when going into any bar. Some bars may allow rowdy behavior, others have strict measures.
In such places speech is a privilege and not a right.
The only remarkable thing here in this article is the size of the discord. The problem with huge size is that the amplification effect is a lot bigger and that tends to get noticed. In the real world you don’t have bars with tens of thousands of guests.
The last line you mention is true-ish if said rather derogatory, but if you value freedom of speech, you can also extrapolate that everyone has a right on their view of life, nothing little about it.
The problem that is not being mentioned is cause and effect. If your view on life is basically violent and emotional, that helps nothing when it comes to public discourse. In all my years when I was a mod on IRC, never did name calling or derogatory names further an argument or improve communication, except when we were maybe discussing the topic itself.
To reuse your bar analogy. I came in and said 'dont you think the tea is not warm enough' owner said 'uhh nooo' I said 'really, I never drank tea that cold, i think it's a lot better warmer' when suddenly the chair was removed from behind and I was thrown out.
Maybe I didn't see the sign 'no complaints about tea temperature allowed in here or you will be removed asap' but I found the whole ordeal ridiculously immature.
If that truly is the case, then I should stand corrected. Thing is, I just looked at the responses on WSB, and “immature” would probably describe the comments really well. I didn’t see any arguments or actual coherent speech, to what is probably a lot of in-crowd signals / meme-ing.
What I am looking forward though is a good in-depth review of what happened, preferably from a neutral party. Because there seem to be politics involved as well (as in wall street influencing)
Yup, I was permabanned from rockpapershotgun for arguing against rootkit multiplayer anti-cheat software and asking that punkbuster, VAC and their equivalents should be regularly reviewed and scrutinized. I didn't use a single swear word. No one reviews anticheat.
Have you ever read the Discord ToS and the partnered server community guidelines? I did read the latter the first time I used the word "retarded" in a self-deprecating manner on a partnered server and was called out for it. The rules are
written in a way that pretty much lets users say anything within the boundaries of the law, but the individual server owners and moderators can be held responsible for not moderating that content.
In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users.
I've seen server moderators removing completely legit messages afterwards and they've openly admitted that they can't risk someone perusing the chat history for ToS breaches, screenshotting individual lines of text and sending them to Discord abuse team, because Discord does not care about context, only actual words (see their anti-reclamation policy - even black hip-hop artists have been deplatformed for using the well known mother of all bad words in a positive context).
I didn't have discord level issues. I didn't know about the long term history legal issues. But in my case there was none of that, only users enforcing their own rules, or having trouble dealing with disagreeing viewpoints. Setting rules is fine on paper but oddly people used to have less rules and less desire to enforce anything back in the days.
On a hundred of IRC channels (which had mods) over many years I had like 3 such interactions (and I have to flex to remember). On discord it was 50% in a month.
discord make people very very attached to their virtual space. They craft it, install emojis, makes per room rules, lots of decisions .. it changes how you connect with others, very defensive by nature.
> In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users.
This only applies to partnered and/or verified guilds. All other guilds are only checked on user complaints and otherwise unmoderated (bar the explicit content filter, that applies at the gateway level, before the event gets propagated) by Discord staff.
The problem for you is that you can make the exactly same argument without the words that people object to and it will upset no one and lie unmoderated.
You're being moderated for rudeness and not your opinion.
I'm not convinced. I think that gives discord and others an easy excuse to censor people or communities they don't want on their platform, but I just don't buy that their real objection was rudeness.
This is an effective excuse because not many will come to the defense of socially unacceptable behavior. Look no further than this thread for examples of that.
Considering that Discord has a lot of gaming communities with underaged people, I can see the need for heavy moderation wrt language that tend to be used for cyberbullying. Whether or not just deleting the server is a good idea I disagree.
Settings up new "servers" is trivially easy and can be done without payment. You can join any number of servers with same account and retain separation (i.e. other users can not see a list of servers you are on). You can change your nickname on server-by-server basis. "Everyone" is already on Discord and by everyone here I mean every gaming community and many tech communities.
For TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and Mumble (which were the big 3 in my youth at least) you have to have different clients, you have to pay for servers, and the chat support is very rudimentary and bad. Channels aren't as easy to create and admin. Lastly they don't support inlined links/images or emojis. Which makes them just as user friendly as IRC.
Discord took what was good about Slack's UI and added on top good VoIP. It might not be perfect but it quite literally covers most what anyone could want and it scales really well. To beat it you must have 100% feature coverage + another killed feature. First part probably isn't that hard, but the second is. There needs to be a reason to install yet another communication program on your PC/tablet/phone because all of the communities wont just uproot and leave to a new platform over night.
How does Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc finance themselves? Selling data and also having subscriptions. If you pay $5/mo you get higher quality video streaming and you can use custom emojis cross the servers you visit.
The value of a network is exponential in the number of users/connections, not in the technical features available. See Voat vs Parler or old Digg vs old Reddit.
There were potential competitors back when it really didn't matter - the early 00s. Even AIM at its feature peak could do pretty much everything Discord can do now (save for some of the server organization and custom content), but only a fraction in the US had Broadband to take advantage of it.
And it wasn't written in resource-hungry Electron.
Demand wasn't there. Gaming was seen way more as "that thing nerds do" and online communities where mostly about very async forums.
Now gaming has hit main stream and is accepted by everyone. Forum concept has been dead in the water for years and everyone has moved go mobile first social medias, but none of the other social medias fill the niche of IM & VoIP.
As side note: we can gripe about Discord being electron based all we want, but that is actually a huge selling point. Discord just works on all platforms with all features. Even Linux is not some shitty after thought that has 3rd party gobbled together client that requires 10 hours of tweaking each week just to keep running. Then obviously the same code base runs on browsers.
I'm working from memory, but AIM at the peak had webcam support and a very rudimentary screen share component. I keep thinking the name of it was "AIM Share", but Googling that does not bring up mentions of it.
The discord was terribly moderated long ago. Apparently nothing changed but maybe a few more rules and auto mutes.
I don’t get offended by the ways people move their mouth or words they substitute for what they say.
If you have been around a racist, you will learn all the secret terms they use or not so secret. Go ahead and look up slang terms for light or dark skinned people in other languages.
Discord just so happened to enforce their rules at a very opportunistic time.
The WSB community calls each other a bunch of names as a form of... I don’t know, acceptance? It’s not meant to hurt. It’s a David versus Goliath mentality, the little guy, the underdog. That’s why they call each other these names.
I think it’s complicated, and that banning them is just another sad example of how sensitive the world has become to these things.
We ban accounts that take swipes at other users like that, so please omit those from your comments here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting to HN, we'd be grateful.
Your comment would have been fine without the last bit.
I agree. Small nitpick: retard in WSB context is not entirely an insult. You can swap letters and come up with trader. It’s WSBs special way of saying you belong to it’s retail trader group that does stupid bets.
This is really important context. WSB traders use words that some would consider offensive in an affectionate way. “Degenerate gambling addict” sounds terrible but it’s a compliment there.
Criticising people’s language without their context reminds me of Americans getting upset when they hear Spanish speakers say the word “black”.
WSB users are so into the argument about context that they forgot that when borrowing from another language, that language's context doesn't just vanish.
I don't think it's quite the same though, the Spanish word for black exists in an entirely different culture that isn't shaped by the words use in modern America. Whereas the WSB usage of language is a direct reaction to the context of the word. They aren't saying retard because it came up through some parallel etymology, they're saying it specifically because it's offensive.
Yeah this is just bastardized internet dialect. The word's increasing offensiveness (for good reason of course) in most of the rest of the English speaking world isn't reflected in WSB using it as a term of endearment. I call my dogs and cat the cutest shithead fuckers all the time while feeding them off my plate, sounds bad in public but in my house with my little group it's, well, pet names.
"not entirely an insult" sorry this is a lame excuse, it's offensive. it's a word used to demean no matter what context. To them its funny, it's not. typical bunch of men who need to show their hyper masculinity with insults and chants of "hold the line". are these the same people that call themselves patriouts.
go to zenomountainfarms.org if you don't understand why the use of that word is offensive
I see what you mean. I saw the subreddit with fresh eyes again. Its unnecessary, rude and demeaning to the people with learning disabilities. But I must concede they seem to be using the term to refer to trading. But what confuses me they call everyone the r-word. Who ever makes a trade on the stock market. Even themselves. Don't you see how unnecessary that is?
I didn't say it was OK, just that it was intentional. You're reading a lot more into my comments than is there. There are a lot of things in life that I don't think are OK. I also don't try to stop them.
Plenty of standup comedians use humor that I find distasteful or even offensive. I just read a book instead of watching them. Plenty of bars are frequented by people I don't like. I just go to a different bar.
No one has to visit WSB, but I'd prefer to live in a society that errs on the side of allowing people to congregate and communicate as they see fit.
As an aside, I've had to deal with two kinds of assholes in my life: people who use offensive language, and people who get offended at everything. I'd rather deal with neither, but if I had to chose, I much prefer the former.
As a moderator of a large (400k+ members) Discord, I can confirm that Discord has specifically told members of the partner program to remove words such as retard. I've never heard of a server being banned for it, but not allowing retard and the like has been a policy for more than a year now.
Because it's a public server, which means Discord feel it reflects on them as a business to be hosting hostile communities.
You can say whatever you want in a closed, private discord group. Discord isn't going to care if it's a server with a dozen users who are all close friends. It's when you go posting invite links everywhere and get a community in the thousands that Discord start taking an interest and enforcing their brand protection.
We're slipping into some alternate universe where freedom of speech is being adjusted for our safety.
It's starting with noble causes, like stemming racism and hate speech. But this is one step into a land of control where divergent opinions will be cause for deplatforming.
Sorry, you don't understand how comment threads work. They are structured like a tree so people can fork off a part of the conversation (if self contained) and discuss that. I chose to discuss the premise that being in the dictionary makes something ok. If I am discerning the premise wrong, or if its not self contained you can point out the connection with the rest of the context.
Ti generalize the expression to both genders, in Italy the pair can refer to testicles, breasts or ovaries. The point being “having significant reproductive potential”... I hope it will never be poco’d to avoid offending people that have reproductive disorders.
My point was more that what most people want to express is “guts”. But they’ll go for “balls” because it needs to be about sex and hormones, what else could it be, right ?
Huh? As someone under 40 I never remotwly had that feeling when talking to e.g. Unix greybeards or other programmers above 50.
Some of their experiences and tricks are great to learn from, some of the stuff they complain abput has been solved for a decade but they don't know it yet. I think if everybody has the feeling that we can learn from each other, we profit more from our interactions.
...they have "a pair" because they use words that as a society we've decided shouldn't be used because they're derogatory to a certain group of people?
I understood GP as talking about what is in the 'overton window' or not. You and I may have qualms about saying retard but I've worked in industries where that is not the case. I've met people who would call an unprofitable VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client telling them what is or is not acceptable to say something I wouldn't say here.
Society is not as monolithic as you think it is. "as a society we" for sure have not decided that these words should not be used or that they are derogatory. Maybe this is true for your circle of friends or for the communities that you enage in but it is not true for the wider world.
Dimwits? You mean 4chan that used media to make neutral sign look racist? Or the white supremacists that took the free advertisement and appropriated a common sign?
The only dimwits are the media companies that contributed to it.
You broke the HN guidelines egregiously with this comment. We ban accounts that do this, regardless of how bad some other comment was or you feel it was. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site to heart. We're trying hard to avoid this sort of mutual bashing on HN.
I'm going to make an argument for linguistic descriptivism. I've never once thought, in the WSB subreddit, someone calling another an "autist" or a "retard" was ever intended to harm or disrespect people with those literal issues. It's a niche audience with very specific meaning. As a linguist, I find it fascinating and aptly descriptive frankly. As a person who knows people with actual mental problems, I understand why it may be distasteful. However I strongly feel that when you enter that subreddit, the jargon is both incredibly obvious and specific.
„Retard“ has evolved and is universally regarded as an insult these days. Denying this entirely obvious fact is rather hard to square with your claim of being a linguist. The science tends to take a more descriptive approach, and to acknowledge the changing nature of language.
No it doesn't, and you have to blatantly ignore the power dynamics between groups to compare the two.
Your analogy would hold only if people with mental disabilities started trying to reclaim the discriminatory connotations of the word by using it to describe themselves.
I think there's a very obvious difference between a group reclaiming a word that has been used to marginalize them and discriminate against them (N word, Queer etc.) and people who are not part of that group using the word to mock each other - and by proxy - the group of people the term is used to mock, and perpetuating its use as a derrogatory term.
Radio edits are a thing and every rapper who uses that word finds it gets censored a lot.
And context here is people picked the terms for 4chan-humour value, and it's quite hard to argue non-autists lolling about how an instance of their behaviour is a bit like an autistic stereotype, or hehe trader is an anagram of how uninformed we think these trades are is an obvious candidate for the meaning being completely unrelated to the use of autist and retard as terms of abuse. Same as if I decide to categorise my friends using derivations of a four letter word: I'm doing so because it's a four letter word, and I don't get to play the 'but I meant it affectionately, specifically and non-literally' card if someone asks me not to swear in this establishment
I certainly don't think it's necessary for Discord to ban them, but if your jargon is chosen for edginess, you don't get to act surprised if someone decides it's too edgy.
The very reason of how words like "retard" evolve in the first
place is by people using those words outside of the standard
dictionary definition's meaning.
What I want to say is that just like there's a huge difference
in meaning between "this is shit" and "this is the shit", even
usually insulting words can be used in inoffensive ways(like
it's done on WSB) - and of course the other way around you can
call someone a "genius" and make it obvious you meant the exact
opposite.
Language is an incredibly flexible tool and every dictionary
definition or scientific description is an obsolete snapshot at
best.
> „Retard“ has evolved and is universally regarded as an insult these days. Denying this entirely obvious fact is rather hard to square with your claim of being a linguist.
This "fact" is not, in fact, a fact. GP is engaging in the act of forcing intersubjective reality - basically willing this "fact" into becoming an actual fact.
This is becoming increasingly common in discourse these days, and noticing it is the key to understanding the various non sequiturs and other abuses of logic made in arguments that try to classify random stuff as offensive. Unlike in the physical world, in the social world, if enough people are forcefully claiming something is a fact, it becomes a fact.
That's why it's even more important socially to combat such abuse of reasoning than it is in hard sciences. You can't make gravity disappear because you really believe humans are capable of levitating. But you absolutely can make acceptance, due process and individual freedoms disappear if enough people strongly insist some other people are saying the wrong things.
That's obviously incorrect. When someone on wallstreetbets says "What's up retards", they are obviously not intending to insult everyone reading it. Context matters.
It's a very convenient excuse for banning a controversial community, though. With the sea change we just had in corporate censorship, no one should be surprised.
I hope we get plausible alternatives with a more principled stand towards censorship.
I think that they are saying it's similar to how the n-word has evolved - out of the right context it's very insulting (and more) but in certain situations it's appropriate, accepted and encouraged.
The OP's explanation is correct. The word "retard" being "universally regarded as an insult these days" is just straight up not accurate - on that sub or otherwise. I don't count myself as a linguist but have learned "get around in an emergency" in a few languages and have studied the history of language a bit, and it's very common for words to absorb new meanings in different contexts.
As others have pointed out, "retard" is an anagram of "trader".
I'm curious to know what is the meaning trying to be conveyed here which would not be received negatively by people with actual autism or caring for one?
You probably recognise this scene from The Wolf of Wall Street. The text uses “degenerate”, “autist” and so on but the whole text and di Caprio’s manner strongly implies that these are positive, desirable qualities. He uses them as terms of endearment and compliments. The rest of /r/wsb is the same. Context matters.
> I've never once thought, in the WSB subreddit, someone calling another an "autist" or a "retard" was ever intended to harm or disrespect people with those literal issues.
What you said is purely annecdotal and it's a big assumption to think you know other people's thoughts and intents are.
Fact is they are popularizing hate speech to a growing audience and its not ok. Period.
Idiot, stupid, moron, immature -- these terms are all much the same as retard in their origin as a neutral clinical label. These were terms referring to impairments that patients often had through no fault of their own. Why are some of those words still acceptably used negatively in a serious fashion, while others are taboo to be used even affectionately or in a neutral context?
Why is your deliberately negative label of "shit-for-brains" any better?
Words change meaning, my dear egregious etymologist.
By that reasoning every nice woman is an ignorant queen. (Nice comes from latin "ne scius", and queen was the general word for woman)
EDIT: egregious also flipped it's meaning; I clearly meant the old meaning of "remarkably good"
You cannot just pick and choose. We live today and we understand each other based on a shared under ding of what words mean and what they are are "meant to mean". A veiled insult is still an insult, and there are places where it's inappropriate
By virtue of the fact that numerous people disagree with your assessment. Should it not be obvious that you could be living in your own private Idaho sharing a belief that all humans experience your gestalt. People have been finding ways to call both themselves and others mentally handicap since communication began. The irony of the current cultural dialogue is that the real negative experience of an expressive and living word is assumed to negate substantial positive aspects which are well documented by those of good humor and cheer. Your line of reasoning attempts to censure peers much as a child would demand of a playmate when in disagreement.
a) whether it's ok or not to insult person A with terminology that currently insults group B as a side effect. (The topic here would be "to PC or not to PC, have we gone to far with it etc; which is a conversation that can and should be had)
b) whether it's ok, while discussing point "a" above, to insist that some words mean something else than what it's generally understand in good faith, in order to apply ineffective whataboutism ("what about idiot, it used to be a medical term!") to the conversation. To what goal? Claim that you can use "retard" because you can use "idiot"? Let's not play etymological games, if you want to discuss about PC overreach, discuss PC overreach; there are plenty of good arguments to be had against extreme political correctness and censure that don't involve having your readers rolling their eyes at blatant attempts to clutching at straws.
Words change meaning over time. They do not flip over in an instant.
What I believe we're seeing is a society-wide disagreement on the connotations of the word. It will shake itself out, one way or another - but this process used to take decades and was barely noticeable. Now it takes months to years, which is catching people by surprise.
Also: the flip side of "words change meaning" is that, during a period of change, you'll encounter people using a different meaning than you. The arguments favoring the updated weight of the word we're discussing here seem frequently of the form, "$word truly means $my-meaning; surely you do not really believe it means $your-meaning, you're just pretending, and in reality you're just a hateful person who hates $me and $mine" - which is essentially twisting logic and sanity into a pretzel.
(For better or worse, I expect the "revisionists" to win over "conservatives" here, now that the updated connotations have institutional backing of big social media companies, in form of the ban policies.)
I think you're right, society is not homogeneous and language does evolve differently in different niches. Usually this can be observed in smaller groups, which have a strong pressure to "code switch" the dominant language of the society where they live. Minority group members do this all the time, all over the world; often there is a continuum of language/dialect/register that speakers navigate throughout their daily lives.
What's peculiar here is that american society has become polarized, on a rough 50/50% split, along certain cultural norms that affect a small part of language.
Members of group A will not easily concede "code switching" to the vocabulary that is ok for group B because group be is not clearly the majority dominant group.
In this case it's easy, since the word has alternatives, so a member of group A doesn't have to code switch to group-B-speak and say "retard" instead of "idiot".
Furthermore some vocal members of group A will demand that members of group B refrain from using that word on the same ground (there is an easy alternative).
You may be rightfully annoyed that group A is dictating something to you, dear group B member. A meager consolation is that there many minorities in the world that know how you feel (although some may not identify you as a minority since you're not; but that's beside the point, that's how it feels to be one).
Culture is complicated.
Where I live there is a big chunk of local culture that uses blasphemy as casual filler words. Other areas of the country, and a sizeable chunk of the same region, find that utterly repugnant and it cannot be used in polite speech (e.g. people are fired for saying "porco Dio" on television). Locals here just know it when it's ok to use it and when it's not a good idea. Some insist they should be free to stay whatever they want, and "porco Dio" they may well be right! A famous local nobel prize winner (Margherita Hack), when asked "do you use blasphemy in casual speech?" answered "sure, I'm from Tuscany!". I myself fit well in the that local culture.
That said, do I still talk like that when my 4yo child is around? No! I don't want him to talk like that until he can control himself and read the room! Is fixing this bug in the society (the rule against insulting the christian God) a hill I want to die on? Why should I? It's just a word, a fun habit, would it be rational for me to yell at people that I'm free to insult their gods because if freedom of speech or whatever? I'd be looked at as a crazy man because that's what I'd be.
To me people who cling their freedom to utter words that a significant portion of their fellow compatriots find offensive, look exactly like that. Picking a silly battle, and entrenching themselves.
Thanks for elaborating. I mostly agree with what you're saying here (and thanks for including a local example!). That said, I think the following isn't the correct portrayal of the situation:
> To me people who cling their freedom to utter words that a significant portion of their fellow compatriots find offensive, look exactly like that. Picking a silly battle, and entrenching themselves.
We're not talking about people who "cling to their freedom" to say what they want to everyone. We're dealing with a group that used language allowed by its local culture, that suddenly got in the spotlight, and now the rest of the world is trying to pressure them into conforming to the norms used elsewhere. To riff of your example, it's like the wide world suddenly noticed Tuscany is a place, and decided to condemn people living there for insulting the Christian god on a regular basis.
I mention this point because, in my observation, this was a common pattern in on-line communities, particularly around forceful introduction of Codes of Conduct. Outsiders would enter a niche community, take public offense at the local language norms, mobilize a wider Internet crowd, and force the community to change their norms under threat of heaps of negative publicity. To me, this kind of behavior reeks of... colonialism.
That would make sense if communities are indeed isolated and want to stay as such. To continue with our little analogy: while Tuscany (and a few other places) have this peculiar cultural trait, it's as still home for a lot of people who don't recognize themselves in that and they also belong there and need to be respected. Very often that's even the numeric majority of people.
"my grandfather and my father and I all cursed God for breakfast for three generations and now I suddenly have to talk like what this pope-kissing bigots want me to?" ignores that there are pope-kissing bigots in your society, your neighbor may be one, your friendly policemen may be well one, the old man across the street.
But also, there are people who are not pope-kissing bigots and YET behave themselves in a way to not saw division. Your children's school teacher may be one, perhaps cursing in the privacy of her home but giving you a look you if your children talk like little fallen angels.
We're all used to norms. I don't think that's the root cause of us having this conversation in the first place.
There is a group of people who is feeling their position in society has changed under their feet and they are frustrated about that. For them these topics become an identity-glue, something to hold on and to tell their ingroup from outgroups.
But there are also people who just don't like norms and just by coincidence happen to be aligned with whoever is the norm-breaker du jour.
It isn’t that backwards? Retard isn’t a slur against against people with intellectual disabilities, it is a neutral description of people with intellectual disabilities, used to slur your buddy who said something dumb.
the word retard is common parlance in many parts of the world.
But lets not be retarded about this, the point is more that they are using a puritan argument about the word retard in a retarded manner in order to shut down discourse, to try and retard the share price of a stock, which has had absolutely retarded performance lately.
I think it's more like if the name "amvalo" caught on as an insult, which meant someone had shit for brains. Both "amvalo" and "shit for brains" would then hold the same meaning, but only one of those terms would be a needless attack on amvalo.
Yeah it’s all about the 3rd party who gets insulted. I have one friend whose brother is disabled and he’s told me off for using it, which I get. Transgression is part of the appeal of curse words
I agree it’s rude but banning a discord of 50k people just for that is highly sus
Is this not the classic problem with all censorship? Of course the majority (and I) would agree that the language used is not productive, but the question of whether something should be allowed, despite its "goodness" (or lack there of), is much more nuanced. I think an argument can be made that the definition of a public forum has changed.
OP can host his own server and invite his friends and they can say whatever they want there.... but no one has any obligation to give him a venue.
If I have a shitty band and I want to book your venue for a gig, you have every right to say to me "no, your band is too shitty for my venue, I don't want to degrade myself or the public in that way."
There's very little nuance here at all, no one is saying he is not allowed to be a terrible person, they're saying they don't want to be associated with him because he's a terrible person.
You seem to think “retarded” is magnitudes worse than all of the other negative words you used and worth shutting down a community for.
I think most people do not think this is true.
I think moderation is hard and I’m generally in favor of private companies being able to moderate how they want (with something like Urbit being a good alternative for a user owned network).
That said, the word policing around this and wsb in particular (a pretty good natured community really) is pretty off.
I know people who grew up with disabled relatives and I can assure you that insult is among the worse things you could use. Maybe those who use it don't think of themselves as bad persons, and "thats just the way language evolved", but if you use this word it shows that you never reflected on the other persons position. It tells me, you are either not the brightest bulb in the shed, unempathic or just mean.
So yes, depending on the context using retard as an insult is worse than many other things. It might not be to you, but so might have been the n-word a few generations before. Just because a lot of people don't get it, doesn't mean it is okay.
Edit: and now that you know that this insult might cut two ways (because you never know who has a disabled relative), you might also deem it less useful.
This is a topic that won’t make much progress on an Internet forum (too heated, too personal for people).
I think there’s a difference between using the word to target someone who is disabled and using it the way it’s used on wsb.
I also think there’s an irony in calling me “not the brightest bulb” for thinking this, which is a euphemistic way to say dumb (or even the word in question) in a way that’s more targeted than most of the forbidden word’s use on wsb.
I also don’t use “retarded” in writing either, I just don’t see as much issue with it in the wsb context.
Huh? I didn't call you "not the brightest bulb”, that was projection on your part and I am sorry for miscommunicating. What I meant was that these are the thought processes that spring to my mind when I hear someone using these phrases. I also explained a little bit of the underlying thinking on my side. This was my attempt of showing you my side of how I think about this.
Also: just because these thoughts spring to my mind doesn't mean I deterministically from now on think that person is stupid etc. I had my best friends use these words in an unreflected way.
My mistake - after rereading your comment I understand what you were saying.
I agree with you actually - I generally find overuse of profanity in real life leaves a bad impression on me too.
I just think the wsb context is a bit of a different thing and the word use in some contexts is fine.
It's also likely some of this is colored by other related word policing I find to be more stupid, (like saying 'on the other hand' is ableist). I have a general bias towards not policing words.
> I think there’s a difference between using the word to target someone who is disabled and using it the way it’s used on wsb.
Try being a white person and using the n-word in any context at all. Apart from an incredibly narrow set of contexts, it's deeply offensive and will be called out as such. Joking with your other white friends isn't one of the acceptable contexts.
If it's not exactly the same, it's very similar. It's a slur, used by members outside a group, defined by birth, to insult them and discriminate against them.
I'm genuinely hoping the huge number of sophists trying to defend it are doing so because they genuinely feel kind of bad for having done so and don't want to comprehend the moral implications of having used it casually for years.
Op doesn’t own the server, but neither do you as far as I know. You are free to express your opinion, but don’t pretend to speak for everyone. In my book, people who use offensive language are preferable to those who make snap value judgement about human worth based on it. The latter is far more destructive
Exactly, at least they didn’t use “childish” as a slur to condemn this behavior they consider inappropriate. Children have a significant inner world that deserves respect... /s
I'm curious, do people who get upset at this word never learn classical piano? Because, well, you're going to encounter that word quite frequently if you do.
A category of person? Being immature means you behave immature. Scolding someone for behaviour is very different than scolding them for something they can't change about them selves (e.g. like where they have been born).
Usually we also factor in age when calling someone immature. So if someone calls you immature, they mean "immature given your age", so it is certainly different from e.g. hating on all kids, teenagers or old people.
Immature: Not fully formed or developed; not grown [1]
It depends on what sense you use it in, just like the r-word.
> Scolding someone for behaviour is very different than scolding them for something they can't change about them selves (e.g. like where they have been born).
Literally what the r-word controversy is about. Glad you finally get it. Except of course if you think that someone was being scolded for having mental deficiency or specifically an IQ below 70 or something, which I doubt and which I would agree would be just as uncouth as scolding an immature person (in the sense of not being fully developed or grown) for being immature as they can't change that about themselves.
> Literally what the r-word controversy is about. Glad you finally get it.
Huh, are you confusing me with someone here? I argued precisely that in this very thread. As someone who grew up knowing people whose relatives were disabled I think of the r-word (and the German equivalent, English is not my first language) as horrible.
Most people who use it are ignorant to what it means to people who have to live with it every day. Which means it is even worse if one thinks about it and goes like "yeah I understand why they hate it, but I am still gonna use it", because then they are not ignorant but malicious.
How is it okay to you to use "immature" and not the r-word?
Both could refer to a category of person based on something they can't change about them selves, and both are in most cases not used to refer to said category.
> As someone who grew up knowing people whose relatives were disabled I think of the r-word (and the German equivalent, English is not my first language) as horrible.
You think children like being called immature?
> Most people who use it are ignorant to what it means to people who have to live with it every day.
Most people who call other people immature also has long since forgotten the anxiety and troubles that come with being an immature human being.
> "yeah I understand why they hate it, but I am still gonna use it", because then they are not ignorant but malicious.
As long as you feel the same about calling people immature, idiots, or anything else that could also be misinterpreted to refer to category of person based on something they can't change about them selves.
We ban accounts that post like this. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN. You may not feel that you owe the person you're arguing with any better, but you definitely owe this community better—much better—if you're participating here.
Your account has already done this more than once, as well as posting unsubstantively and baitingly in other ways. That's a poor track record for only 11 comments. I don't want to ban you, so please fix this. On HN we want thoughtful, curious conversation. Bashing each other like this is obviously at the far extreme from that. No more of this, please.
