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by Nyetan 3976 days ago
This brings up a point that's been nagging at me for a while: does making a community more inclusive necessarily mean making it less distinctive? GenderDetector (formerly SexMachine [1]) is another example of this process, wherein what was formerly considered within the norm of politeness is now sufficiently far outside to cause outcry. I'm curious what other people think -- this has been on my mind for a while, and although I like parts of the predicted conclusion (more people for me to share my hobby with!) others frighten me (genericization to the point of losing meaningful cultural identity).

[1] https://github.com/bmuller/gender_detector/pull/14
3 comments
MrDosu 3976 days ago
All i thought when reading the linked thread was "What a horrendous waste of so many developer hours".

Tolerance is a two way street. It also means accepting minor things you necessarily don't agree with. These topics are blown so far out of proportion that they are actually hurtful to workplace and gender equality.

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ebola1717 3976 days ago
The parts of the "distinctiveness" and "cultural identity" we'd lose are exactly the ones we don't want in the first place.
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MrDosu 3976 days ago
Who decides what part of my "distinctiveness" and "cultural identity" is acceptable? You? The majority? Some higher authority?

This is a slippery slope...

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Nyetan 3976 days ago
Fair enough, I suppose. Still, I'll miss reading the occasional post outlining Linus' outbursts on the kernel mailing lists when that day comes.
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DanBC 3976 days ago
You can make your project distinctive by yelling "NIGGERS NIGGERS NIGGERS" or by actually being creative, innovative, interesting, useful, etc.

Not yelling "NIGGERS NIGGERS NIGGERS" doesn't mean your project turns into homogenous gray sludge, indistinguishable from all the other projects. If anything the projects that fling slurs are less distinctive - they're all so stupid that they limit themselves to English slurs so they end up with a very limited set of insulting terms. If they want to be hrave they could see all the stuff that's illegal in various countries and include those concepts. They should start insulting the ruling family of Kuwait, for example.

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