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Twitter Engineering:We’re starting with a set of words we want to move away from
- ShorsHammer 6y agoSo I'm meant to associate the word follower with slave if working at Twitter? Some unintended consequences there given how the term is used by them in forward-facing contexts.
- rvz 6y agoYet here we have a Twitter engineer who worked on this and their username is very hard for anyone to cite without 'offending' another person. [0] Let me be the first and see what happens. 1 step forward, 512 steps back. [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/negroprogrammer/status/1278728952522043393 https://mobile.twitter.com/negroprogrammer/status/1278728952...
- throwaway2048 6y agoI don't believe that gotchas like this have the effect you think they do.
- untog 6y agoHuh? A black person appropriating a term of abuse for themselves is very different than a white person using it against them. Their username is not offensive.
- danielscrubs 6y agoIt’s definitely offensive, it’s also definitely not racist in this context.
- lostapathy 6y agoI also can’t say his name at a team meeting to cite where I learned something he may have tweeted. You can’t really make a word unusably offensive by others, but then keep using it yourself. At least not if you still want your voice to be part of the broader discussion.
- loopz 6y agoHaving different double standards who get to use the term is not only hypocritical, it's also racist. Therefore everyone must be allowed to use his nick: negroprogrammer, or risk the above violation. I think it smart if for free speech, and not just used as a sword or shield against others.
- Ar-Curunir 6y agoYet they won’t ban neo-Nazis and white supremacists, including the chief one: Trump
- xingyzt 6y agoThe more inclusive terms are also easier to understand from my perspective as a non-native English speaker. Allowlist and legacy status, for example, are much more literal in their meaning.
- dvtrn 6y agoThat’s awesome! If nothing else, improving clarity and understanding among each other and making communication easier as our workforces become more globally and linguistically varied is-if nothing else decent and appropriate, right?
- esrauch 6y agoI agree for allowlist but not for grandfathered; as a native speaker "grandfathered" is just an English word and I don't think it means the same thing as "legacy status" in most cases. To me "legacy status" sounds like "deprecated", as in "the system is still there but we plan to get rid of it". Grandfathered means "we wouldn't add it today, but since it's there it can continue as a first class citizen indefinitely". A house that doesn't follow new building codes isnt torn down, it's grandfathered in. But it's definitely not a "legacy house", it's still just a fully functioning house that doesn't match what new construction would be but that's ok.
- mjevans 6y agoSimilarly, I feel "grandfathered" implies a similar meaning as 'exempted' (which seeing elsewhere, the meaning, but not the source propagated with the word's use). Compare: The use of fax for the transmission of medics records is grandfathered. The use of fax for the transmission of medics records is exempted. Both are true, but grandfathered, as noted above, implies that it really wouldn't be allowed in today but gets to exist because some people just can't move on and look for a better technology. (In fact, many of the reasons I hate fax are features for it's die-hard users. It's fire and forget, open loop, low quality, and as easy as dialing a phone entry. Also, there's no security attached to the sender or receiver.)
- Barrin92 6y agoI actually like the more neutral terms from a technical perspective because they seem more self-evident but if people think this solves any sort of racism I'm not sure what to think Jack Dorsey spent his last holiday on a private meditation retreat in Myanmar, while the people in the streets were organising anti-muslim mobs on social media. Maybe they ought to work on that if they're looking for racism on their platform
- XorNot 6y agoSlavery is with us today in too many parts of the world. American chattel slavery was ~3 human lifetimes ago (for long enough lived humans). I am completely okay with removing words which imply domination and subjugation without moral judgement from day to day vocabularly. Slavery is a horrific, barbaric practice, and if the word only ever comes up in one context with all the moral and emotional weight that should carry, then that's an improvement.
- bitL 6y agoAre Slavic nations going to be renamed?
- foogazi 6y agoThey have legacy status
- XorNot 6y agoMaybe go lookup the entymology of "slavic" and then consider how stupid your hot take makes you look.
- bitL 6y agoIt's not about their etymology, it's about the origin of the word "slave" in English language that stems from Slav: https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave https://www.etymonline.com/word/slave
- imgabe 6y agoI just have a hard time believing that anybody hears the word "Grandfathered" in an engineering context and thinks: "But wait a minute, I would be a Grandmother, not a Grandfather. They must be using that word to subtly indicate that they do not want me here, despite having gone through an exhaustive recruiting and interview process to select me and then paying me quite a lot of money". This seems like an enormous waste of time. Edit: I was corrected below about why Grandfather is considered objectionable. I think the general point still stands. Nobody is using these terms with the intent of excluding anyone. Interpreting them that way takes a deliberate effort that would probably be better spent elsewhere.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sergiotapia 6y agoI'm honking my horn vigorously.
- empath75 6y ago> The term originated in late nineteenth-century legislation and constitutional amendments passed by a number of U.S. Southern states, which created new requirements for literacy tests, payment of poll taxes, and/or residency and property restrictions to register to vote. States in some cases exempted those whose ancestors (grandfathers) had the right to vote before the Civil War, or as of a particular date, from such requirements. The intent and effect of such rules was to prevent poor and illiterate African-American former slaves and their descendants from voting, but without denying poor and illiterate whites the right to vote.[1] Although these original grandfather clauses were eventually ruled unconstitutional, the terms grandfather clause and grandfather have been adapted to other uses.
- throwawaysea 6y agoThe thing is no one actually associates the modern use of the term with this history. The same intent and effect are not present. Except that those associations are now being made or brought to the forefront and amplified into some kind of outrage. It comes off a bit like people digging into someone’s comment history to try and assassinate their character on Twitter or Reddit.
- KoftaBob 6y agoPure virtue signaling, end of story.
- ThrowawayR2 6y agoAlready discussed a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723433
- r721 6y agoAlso here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23726882
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoI worked at a company that did this almost a decade ago. The idea seemed simple enough, but the unintended consequences started adding up over the next few years. The biggest problem was that the company became the arbiter of what was offensive and what was not. We felt like we came up with a comprehensive list when we started, but a few people became very good at finding new words that might possibly be offensive to someone, somewhere, in some context. Eventually the company has to draw the line and decline to remove potentially-offensive words, at which point the company is effectively declaring that topic not offensive enough to take action. This doesn’t go over well, and some people are very eager to make a big deal about it on social media. The second problem is that declaring certain words to be possibly offensive is easily misinterpreted as declaring those words as always offensive. We had problems with people assuming ill intent when interview candidates and new hires accidentally used words on the banned list with no ill intentions. Marking the words themselves offensive instead of the person’s intentions creates a lot of traps for people who don’t know about or haven’t yet fully memorized the bad words list. This created a lot of divisions and cliques within the company where people were hesitant to interface with certain other groups for fear of being mistakenly marked as offensive. When the safest option is to keep to yourself or a small group of peers who you know won’t misinterpret your words, cooperation and coordination decreases. The third problem was the long tail complexity of eliminating these words from the business. Doing a search and replace on the codebase and documentation is easy enough. But you’re still left with third party open source projects and services that contain the bad words. Once you reach the point of people suggesting to fork open-source services just to rename parts of the source code, the complexity and cost grows exponentially. At the worst point, we had a team trying to justify creation of an Ubuntu fork that used the phrase “manual pages” everywhere instead of the possibly-sexist “man pages”. The amount of engineering time, energy, and dollars spent debating these topics and implementing solutions spiraled into far more complexity than any of us imagined at the start.
- spo81rty 6y agoWhere does this ever end is my thought as well.
- 6y ago
- mellosouls 6y agoTwitter to talk quickly and nervously in a high voice, saying very little of importance or interest https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/twitter https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/twitter Twit a stupid person https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/twit https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/twit
- goldforever 6y agoI literally LOL'ed!
- Galanwe 6y agoAs a non native speaker, I do not quite understand why "dummy value" and "sanity check" are in the list. Is there a hidden meaning behind those words?
- revicon 6y agoI believe the thinking is they are insensitive to people with mental illnesses.
- goldforever 6y agoNah....they're just making it up as they go along!
- ddlutz 6y agoAs a native speaker, I can almost understand dummy value. But sanity check doesn't seem offensive at all. One definition of sanity is "reasonable and rational behavior." so sanity check would be checking if the behavior is reasonable and rational.
- eloisius 6y agoPresumably they are examples of ableist discrimination against dumb people (those who cannot speak) and the mentally ill (insane).
- McGlockenshire 6y ago"Sanity check" hits home with me, so I guess I'll try to explain why it's problematic. I happen to use that phrase and variants on it throughout my code & comments as part of defensive programming. I'm talking about having to put in gratuitous checks to make sure that the given data is plausible given the expectations of the business logic. My background is mainly in "legacy" applications where bad data can be a real concern. The intent is to make sure that the conditions are right to continue processing the data, with the alternative being either correcting the data or raising an error strong enough to get the bad data noticed. The problem with "sanity" in this context has to do with social stigmas about mental illness. As someone that is mentally ill, I get it. Yup, my brain processes things incorrectly according to the world. Yup, this makes life difficult for me. But I am not "insane" despite my brain's broken data and twisted business logic. While I am not personally offended or put off by the use of "sanity" in this way around software engineering, I agree with the general principle that judging "sanity" in code can be problematic. There are ways to express the same idea without implying judgement about mentally ill people.
- techntoke 6y agoWhat about the phrases black magic, darknet and black market?
- yaacov 6y agoDo you think any of those are common in twitter’s codebase?
- mjevans 6y agoThey appear to be excellent examples of what will probably in the future be compared to the 1950s hunt for 'commies' in the US, with respect to users of language that some might take offense to.
- wirthjason 6y agoThe security team might use white hat and black hat hackers.
- slickrick216 6y agoAlready in the virtue signalling repo pipeline. Pull request submitted. Zdnet had a faux outrage article about this yesterday.
- peterlk 6y agoCan someone explain to me the "dummy" and "sanity" exceptions? I have never even considered that these words might be offensive. Perhaps not emotionally neutral, but then why not "poor" (performance) or "silly"? Is there some context that I'm not aware of?
- tazedsoul 6y agoIt’s a reach. Or else perhaps Twitter is concerned about offending the numerous employees who lack sanity and may feel excluded by someone else wanting their code to run.
- lostapathy 6y agoThis just means new words/phrases will be offensive and need purged in a few years. Lest we forget, “retard” used to be the kind way to describe mentally challenged people when earlier phrases became offensive.
- ShorsHammer 6y agoHopefully all the would-be enforcers of language don't find out what happens inside a commercial plane cockpit on landing.
- tazedsoul 6y agoIf you want to believe that a multi-billion dollar company cares about your feelings or people in general simply because it has come up with its own dictionary of acceptable words for concepts then go right ahead. What truly has Twitter done for humanity? Allowed racists and monsters to verbally assault anyone they choose, hiding behind anonymity? This is classic virtue signaling, concealing an absolute void of concern for people.
- revicon 6y agoAs a white guy who has never experienced racism before, I don’t feel comfortable judging weather any of these changes make sense. I would hope that they’ve sat down with groups of people they believe they are offending with these words and figured out if these changes actually make a difference to them. If the have, then more power to them.
- pseudalopex 6y agoThe person who initiated the effort is black.
- coffeefirst 6y agoIf people would like to do this, that's cool. As long as I can still call myself crazy I see no reason to object. But have no illusion: this doesn't actually count as doing something, and you get zero accolades for it. If you want to do something useful, and I highly encourage it, here are some ideas: fix your platform (start by kicking the Nazis off), fix your hiring process, and call your city council rep to ask what they're going to do to ensure the police treat all members of the public fairly and professionally.
- kyriakos 6y agoI honestly cannot understand how "sanity check" can be offensive to anyone. I am not saying there no other ways to express the same meaning but I also don't see why it should be changed in the first place since its already established.
- taylodl 6y agoWe also no longer use the word niggardly - even though its etymology is completely different from the other n-word that sounds similar. We somehow survived that. Likewise we no longer use the word retard as in I need to retard this engine's timing so it runs richer. Yet both of these are words I grew up with and guess what? We're still here and our engines are running just fine, thank you. I'm old enough to have heard with my own ears that language evolves. The set of words used today are a different set of words than were used when I was growing up and the set of words that were being used when I was growing up was a different set than were used when my grandparents were growing up. You'd think a bunch of technology people wanting to "change the world" would understand this better. Anyway, to my ears griping about language changing is like griping about loud music: you're just getting old. As my father always said getting old stinks but it sure beats the alternative. Now get off my lawn! P.S. - when I was growing up you heard the word stinks a lot for where you'd now use the word sucks. But sucks used in such a pejorative manner was considered a 4-letter word due to its reference to fellatio. Like I said, language changes and evolves.
- mnm1 6y agoThe stupidity is just incredible. Let's see what happens when they take gendered pronouns out of Spanish or other similar language. What incredible stupidity and idiocy. I hope to never meet these idiots. This is on par with calling the corona virus a hoax as far as stupidity. It censors extremely common phrases. If this is what Americans think they need to do to get rid of sexism and racism, sexism and racism will never diminish in this country. Unbelievably insane stupidity. It really cannot be said enough.