The Chapo.Chat moderators have already stated that they're planning on removing the hard-coded slur filter from their instance of Lemmy; it's the reason you're not able to say the full text of ACAB. It's just a bad idea to have something like this hard-coded in, leftist instances are created by fostering a good culture and not by babying the people who run these servers and if we want Lemmy to grow as an actual federated alternative to Reddit then it's worth bringing up how bad this policy is by the original developers.
You must log in or register to comment.
Word filters are infamous as meme generators, and this is a good example of why.
Also the word filter makes sense based on the lack of moderating tools sophistication in the lemmy code, so the filter should shrink a bit as those are developed, but not go away totally.
Or just channel Johnny Dangerously, at the risk of starting a struggle session on whether '80s Michael Keaton/Joe Piscopo movie references are problematic, and if so, to what extent.
You’ll never be able to say the N-word here though.
N-neoliberal?
The intent behind hard-coding the filter is making it so reactionaries have a much harder time creating their own communities on Lemmy, trying to make it so our tools aren't being used by reactionaries to organize. But it's relatively simple to remove and they'll just make their own fork with the changes, so ultimately it's gonna be fruitless.
Last I looked at the lemmy source code, that slur filter was a single line of code. That was a couple of month ago though.
Not to beat a dead horse, but It's not a good idea to have it hard-coded like that. Any conceivable list of slurs will come with its own cultural biases, so regardless of good intent it falls short. Maybe I shouldn't try to read people's minds, but perhaps they're anxious about the very real possibility of horrible people using lemmy to communicate and organize. I get that, but it's something you need to get over when you're making your software available like this. You are not responsible for what people using your software do and to think otherwise is somewhat indicative of some kind of god complex. (This is not to throw any kind of shade on the devs, of course, they seem great and have done a great job.)
The slur filter is so dumb. Diego removedundez plays for the New England Revolution. A smartwatch is worn on one's wrist. It is important for school buildings to be built using flame reremovedant materials.
Who thought it was a good idea to have this hard coded?
The original developers are very talented and have incredibly good instincts so far, but yeah it's just a growing pain thing that needs to change.
Yeah. I can see the intent behind it, but a few quick examples show how it's not really practical.
At least I can say queer. A lot of websites won't let me say queer or have it in my username, despite the fact I am queer.
It's just a pointless hindrance to basic discussion, every single time someone writes "could you please pass me the flame removedant" or "my favourite microscopic organisms aremovedigrades" or "I fucking hate those disgusting subhuman removed who scuttle in our streets like cockroaches to soil our pure Blonde heritage" it'll make it all illegible. Quality discourse ruined, for no good reason!
I don't understand why that word is even on the list of slurs. Is it offensive to people who were born out of wedlock?
Beats the hell out of me, ten bucks says they might have just gotten a list of slurs from online and used that as a base and never really thought about it because this is the first major instance as far as I can tell.
I think it's the last syllable
the sremovedhorpe problemedit:lol, it has the actual one from the early 2000s too
edit2: IT KILLED THE FUCKING LINK TO THE PROBLEM AHAHAHAHAHA
Oof, it took it right out of the middle of your word, that's pretty bad
Edit: Hahahaha what the fuck
it's the S[strong swear word for vagina/misogynist slur if american]horpe problem, named after a town in england that got caught up in filters on the early internet
Yeah, this is kind of hilarious. Fark.com was famous for its word filter but that one was used for a gag and it was a still little bit more robust than this one. Looking forward to the weird Bowlderizations we come up with in the meantime.
the only really funny word filter that I can remember from SA was when people in FYAD wouldn't stop using the (hard r) n word so they filtered it to 'grandma'
As a greater point, what will we do to prevent slurs? Will we even have a slur filter on this instance or just have enough moderation and yelling at wreckers that we don't have to hear anything like that.
If the filter was less aggressive and matched whole words only it'd probably be fine, though deleting the entire message and responding with a bot explaining why that word causes harm would be much more effective for what we're doing. We don't want to just bleep stuff out where it's super obvious what someone just said, if someone used a slur then that message needs to be unmade entirely and there needs to be immediate education or banning. Deliberately trying to evade the filter to use a slur as a slur should result in being ejected from teh community and should be happening infrequently enough outside of raids that it shouldn't really be a major concern that someone could use X's in front of and after a word to evade the filter, normally people should only be actually posting slurs by pure ignorance and anyone posting it otherwise just makes their malice known.
Is that even effective though? We should just be able to trust that people using this platform aren't foaming at the mouth to say the n word or something and that if someone says a word like tr*p we can just have a struggle session over it like posters do.
Is deleting posts and having a bot post explanations as to why the word is harmful effective? Or are you talking about the current filter?
If the former, absolutely yes. Multiple subs on reddit use that approach and it works really well, people are generally receptive to it and wean themselves off of slurs because they're posting in good faith and just genuinely didn't know that word was a problem. It doesn't require strict filtering, exact matches work jsut fine because anyone trying to evade the filter can just be safely assumed to be posting in bad faith and immediately banned.
If the latter, obviously not. It catches unrelated words like basterd and generally assumes we're not going to be punishing people for trying to say slurs without triggering the filter. The community, as you said, isn't foaming at hte mouth to say these words, 99% of hte time when we're not being raided it'll be said out of ignorance and all that's needed to catch those cases is an exact or near-exact match.
If you're implying it'd be better to have no filter at all, that then puts the onus on the community to intervene every single time someone says a word, struggle about it, deal with cliques that think it's OK, et cetera. It's not worth the stress on everyone to get people to stop using slurs, it wasn't fun on the old subreddit and it wouldn't be fun now. A filter and bot response can automate that entire struggle session for us and makes it clear what the official stance is on those slurs, and lets the user know that if they continue to use those slurs they're liable to be banned. Like I'm really, really tired of having to explain to people why the r-slur is bad and I don't want other ND people to have to defend themselves every time it comes up.
one of the features of my mental illness (when untreated) is psychosis, getting a message about how the word 'crazy' is harmful is insulting. the first and last time it happened was on a sub that I was unaware had this automod feature. Deleted the message and never returned. I have experience violence from the state because I am crazy, the word itself doesn't hurt.
I guess it just feels infantilizing.
The thing is, it bothers me when someone says they're OK with slurs and just uses it and tries painting those who take issue with those slurs as themselves being bigoted somehow for not wanting those words used around them. I don't want to be called the r slur, I don't like people normalizing that word because it leads to others like me being called that word.
If you find being asked to not use a word patronizing, then don't use the word. While you might be irritated, it's a lot worse for those targeted by those words who don't take as nonchalant an attitude towards the word. Someone else autistic that's OK with the r slur that gets upset about being asked to not use it doesn't invalidate my own discomfort with that word.
Honestly, if that was your response to good faith criticism, it was probably for the best that you didn't remain. The alternative is relitigating why X word is bad every time someone wants to argue that a harmful word is OK because you're part of the group it targets.
lol, I love being patronized. you read a ton into that that I didn't think let alone write.
I think that's as simple as not including words like trap and instead just filtering words that are exact, whole word matches that have no innocent uses. We don't have to be unable to talk about Chapo Trap House to still automate action to be taken against someone saying the N word. It mostly removes the need for someone to have to see it in the first place. There is an option other than having a draconian filter or no filter at all
If you don't like it, fork it. I think if you want to say slurs there are image boards for that
