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Bluesky now checks against this array of slurs when creating a username
- sub7 3y agoThis 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
- elektor 3y agoContext: 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.
- MicropenisMike 3y agoMy only surprise is that it took this long
- skiman10 3y ago[flagged]
- yokoprime 3y agoAdd this to the list of "running a social network is hard" issues
- subsistence234 3y agorunning a social network for people that can't handle rude words on a screen is hard.
- chromoblob 3y ago"running a social network and not making silly blacklists of names is hard"
- cmcaleer 3y agoS*yb*y is now a slur on the same level as racial slurs now?
- subsistence234 3y agothe whole userbase of bluesky, judging by how they're acting right now.
- justjoined2 3y agoNo one has said that they are on the same level?
- cmcaleer 3y agoThey'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.
- justjoined2 3y agoDoes 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SSLy 3y agoThey are literally in the same flat array
- phailhaus 3y agoThat just means that they both meet the same bar. It doesn't follow that they are equally horrible. Murder and tax evasion are both crimes, does that mean they're on the same level?
- e436346 3y ago[flagged]
- micromacrofoot 3y agoSurprised they didn't do it sooner... this is like step 1 of automated moderation. If you've got an input, someone will put a slur in it.
- phalangion 3y agoHopefully they can avoid the Scunthorpe problem.
- haolez 3y ago> "gyp", There goes the GYP project handle[0]. At least GNU Gimp is still safe :) [0] https://gyp.gsrc.io/ https://gyp.gsrc.io/
- KennyBlanken 3y ago[flagged]
- jaywalk 3y ago"Gyp" isn't even a slur to most people...
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago[flagged]
- phito 3y agoI've never heard of "Gyp" in my whole life and have no idea what it means. Also, there are a lot more languages than English. Do you want to ban all acronyms that sound like a slur in one of them?
- floomk 3y agoYour name is similar to a slur in my language. Please change it.
- mhb 3y agoMaybe they can untangle the vanity plate situation as well: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-rules-ban-offensive-license-plates-likely-violates-first-amendment https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-rules-ban-offensiv...
- foderking 3y agowhat a joke. lol
- pirate787 3y agoSeriously. My single-dev web service has a better list.
- MarcoZavala 3y ago[dead]
- robin-redbreast 3y agoI still can't sign up and see what it's all about anyway. I'm not losing sleep over it, but I'd still like to poke around.
- badcppdev 3y agoThey 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
- xdennis 3y ago> 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.
- badcppdev 3y agoI 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.
- ajot 3y agoTesla, Ford, Daihatsu, Suzuki, Mitsubishi?
- SSLy 3y agotranny, faggot, dick, slut, motherfucker mind you, I only condone usage of the 3rd and 5th.
- Philorandroid 3y agoGive me five good men and fifteen minutes, we'll compose a far more comprehensive list of cuss words. lol
- Kaotique 3y agoMust be a fun morning for the devs to come up with a list. Not very complete as of yet.
- guidoism 3y agoAt 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.
- _fat_santa 3y agoThe 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.
- FroshKiller 3y agoIt's not a slur exactly, but in the United States, "Ivan" is a common name used to refer (usually dismissively) to Russians.
- Name_Chawps 3y agoI've heard the same thing happen with Mohammed
- DrThunder 3y agoIt is a slur. Italians just don't really care that much though so it loses most of its power. WOP is another one, but again it's gets laughed off for the most part. I always find it strange how some slurs get clung to like people don't want them to go away.
- jaywalk 3y agoSome 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.
- 3y ago
- hirundo 3y agoI 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stickyricky 3y agoThis 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.
- xdennis 3y agoYankee is a slur? I thought it was just an endearing name for Americans. (I know in the US it only refers to North Americans.)
- jazzyjackson 3y agoR.I.P. my sauerkraut fan club 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.
- whstl 3y agoFunny 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.
- frantathefranta 3y agoI 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.
- GloomyBoots 3y agoFunny, I’ve heard potet in Norway as well. Is this a common slur in Germanic countries?
- whstl 3y agoIt'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.
- fundad 3y agoR.I.P. my friend Tito
- tekla 3y agoWell, at some point they are going to learn about 1337sp33k. Also, I learned some new and interesting words today. I should open a pull request to add "karen" to the list and see what happens.
- _fat_santa 3y agoForgive my naïveté but isn’t bluesky open source and decentralized? So wouldn’t say some group just spin up an instance without these restrictions?
- jazzyjackson 3y agoYes, 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)
- msla 3y ago> Yes, but they're currently prefederation (can't run your own instance yet) What's stopping you?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KoftaBob 3y agoYou actually can now, but it's still in "sandbox" stage. https://atproto.com/blog/federation-developer-sandbox https://atproto.com/blog/federation-developer-sandbox
- msla 3y agoSo you could take their code, tell them to screw off, and run your own instances independently of them?
- KoftaBob 3y agoYes, 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.
- anonymoushn 3y agoA pal's surname is on the list, guess he just has to change his name in real life
- fundad 3y agoLast week, while on Long Island of all places, I got an alarming text from a friend of a friend whose name is pronounced Key-Kay.
- jaywalk 3y agoThere's an MLB player named Kiké Hernandez and there's been some fretting over his name, including calls for him to change it. Which is... something.
- TeaDude 3y agoWhat the devil is a "spade" other than something you make sandcastles with?
- phito 3y ago> add more words that should be cought 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! ;)
- shitlord 3y agoGitHub already bans accounts and repos for using no-no words in commits, PRs, and comments. See: https://www.techdirt.com/2021/02/03/content-moderation-case-study-github-attempts-to-moderate-banned-words-contained-hosted-repositories-2015/ https://www.techdirt.com/2021/02/03/content-moderation-case-...
- KennyBlanken 3y agoIt's not a typo. Google it. It's a derogatory term for white people who adopt black culture and mannerisms.
- chaoticmass 3y agoI think they mean cought vs caught
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- traspler 3y agoLuckily only one language is spoken on this planet, english, or they would need to introduce many more such lists ;)
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoThat's gonna end up being a HUGE array.
- donatj 3y agoIt’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.
- azinman2 3y ago[flagged]
- GloomyBoots 3y agoMy 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.
- _gabe_ 3y agoIsn'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?
- haburka 3y agoIt’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.
- randomcarbloke 3y agoI'm torn between wanting to add additional slurs and not wanting such a commit on my github history.