[pierrec]

Really? Several times I thought I saw threads mysteriously being ranked downwards, only to find out they contained a formal (or other) discussion of swear words, so I always concluded that there's some sort of "shitstorm detector" at play. But maybe I'm just imagining things...

[dang]

Your observations were probably real but you might have misinterpreted them. We do penalize subthreads for being shitstorms, flamewars, or off-topic. (Tediously off-topic, that is. Whimsmical offtopicness is fine.) And profanity is more common when people are upset, so one would expect a correlation. But profanity isn't a moderation concern per se.