For example, "fuck you" is offensive because it's rude, vulgar and expresses contempt, not because of how exactly "fuck" is spelled. "F-ck you" is still rude and vulgar because it conveys the exact same meaning. The only difference to the recipient of such a request is that it's slightly more annoying to read, an annoyance that is surely dwarfed by the offense taken to the rude and vulgar meaning, and its intent as an expression of contempt.
It's better described as the exact opposite, a sort of a censorship circumvention; you can omit or replace a few letters to get past dumb word filters or comply with poorly worded courtesy policies and still convey the meaning to humans. Where no such filters and policies are in place, it's pointless.
A scary thought is that we may be so conditioned by machines and machine-like policies that our means to circumvent them now occur to us naturally even in contexts where they don't make a difference.
It is an interesting exercise for me. Try not to swear. No substitutes allowed. It is oddly difficult for me.
H-w f-- -an we t-k- wr--i-g -ord- in a -ens--r-d f-rm?
If there is one freedom people have is to control their language, wether to avoid certain words or to utter words that other find silly.
And no-one is talking about taking away people's freedom. You can write all your emails in all caps if you want, but we can discourage people from doing that.
Figured out what it was supposed to mean from the replies.
Edit: TTP is the metric name. Sorry, it’s early.
Imagine: aliens get the Arecibo message but don't quite know what to make of it, until they see the boobs and dicks drawn on the moon and they correlate it with their own crass fascination with reproductive organs, and only then do they recognize humanity as a self-aware species.
That, or they just smudged it out after doing it.
As I understand it, the UI folks at Nintendo who were working on the Wii controller did user testing, of course. In one test, they would hand a new user a controller wand with instructions to "Just draw stuff on the screen" using a simple drawing program.
The metric Nintendo came up with was called TTP, or the how long in minutes and seconds -- sometimes, only seconds -- before the user drew the inevitable male genitals. "Time To P-n-s". Averaged something like two or three minutes.
Every new vista humankind opens will be so decorated. And so, World of Text: QED. :-)