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by ruined 1676 days ago
it was a shortcut to cull the lowest effort 4chan-style spam until moderation tools were implemented. the functionality is still there, in fact it's more configurable now

they did it because social media can't get off the ground if it's full of useless garbage. would you read hn if all the comments were just the same word over and over?
2 comments
esyir 1676 days ago
Eh, from what I know, it was very much ideological, at least that's what I heard from people I knew working with it.

To quote the dev on this himself:

>And putting it in a DB table means someone could very easily remove it by deleting every row of that table, which isn't good. I want to make it very difficult for racist trolls to use the most updated version of Lemmy.

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andrewzah 1676 days ago
I don’t really think HN would have taken off if there were such heavy handed approaches to moderation in the first place. Further, I don’t believe a lack of this filter would result in “the same word over and over”. What?

One of the things that makes F/OSS great is user freedom. Why would I want to use F/OSS from someone that had such “my way or the highway” opinions about subjective things like how to handle people using bad words?

Edit: wording

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jlkuester7 1676 days ago
> One of the things that makes F/OSS great is user freedom.

I don't think you are talking about the same kind of freedom. FLOSS freedom is the ability to view and edit the source code. Just because the source code does not do what you want does not mean you are not free to fork the project and change the behavior for yourself...

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andrewzah 1676 days ago
I would argue that just because the source code is available, that doesn't mean the project is in the spirit of free software or respects users.

Imagine if curl just refused to download specific websites. Or if golang refused to compile code at all if it detected certain words in comments.

Sure, yeah, these would be still free software given that the source code is available to edit to one's liking. But it's really not in the spirit of free software & user freedom to impose arbitrary things like this. The free software / open source landscape would be incredibly irritating to work with in general if this sort of hostile attitude to downstream users prevailed.

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