[andrewzah]

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

[jlkuester7]

> 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...

[andrewzah]

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.