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Re:Why-did-you-update – Warnings about unnecessary React upd... by philliphaydon on Thursday April 20, 2017 @03:19AM (#14154610)
I think this argument in this video about jokes and people being offended sums it up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryYETmi9lNA

"Because anything that has a status has a kind of power, and power always corrupts. It must be allowed for it to be subjected to ridicule, when that is not possible anymore, you get nasty situations, a dictatorship or something. That's why ridicule is important."

"Furthermore, an insult is to some people a truth they are rather not confronted with. And this could mean that we can't talk about this or that because someone might be offended."

Obviously insulting people directly is bad and no one on HN would allow that all. If the readme said everyone was a shitty developer because they had unnecessary updates, that's clearly not very nice.

But the readme has a couple of non-directed words used in a completely harmless way. If we police this sort of text then we may as well just shut down the internet entirely. People will be too scared to say something because society decided to take offense to the english language.

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