Is it really censorship, though? You insist on conveying the meaning of the word, which is what is offensive if anything. By omitting a couple of letters you've only saved us from its exact spelling.

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.

This sort of censorship has been going on for a long time. For example 'oh fiddlesticks'. They are still swearing. But some sort of odd self censorship happened.

It is an interesting exercise for me. Try not to swear. No substitutes allowed. It is oddly difficult for me.

I would like to upvote this comment for it's clarity of thinking.

It seems odd to write "genitals" but not write "penis".

H-w f-- -an we t-k- wr--i-g -ord- in a -ens--r-d f-rm?

I think we should be discouraging that kind of self-censorship for all but the worst words. Not only do people start to use it for ridiculous political posturing (e.g. "wmen" or "gmers") but it just makes what you're write ever so slightly harder to understand. And for what benefit?

How is the original comment harder to understand?

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.

Censored words are much more likely to be ambiguous. I wasn't referring to that specific example but now you mention it, p_n_s does take a fraction longer to understand than penis.

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.

In a previous sentence they mentioned TTP, then they mentioned P-n-s. I thought this was another acronym of sorts. Like "Posts not sexy" or whatever. I spent a couple seconds to figure out what it meant, failed, and just moved on.

Figured out what it was supposed to mean from the replies.

They are welcome to avoid certain words, and I am welcome to criticize it.

GP didn't imply it wasn't!

Only by a strictly-literal, context-free reading.

Not if it prevents the point from being made. Which in this case it has. And then detracts from the post altogether. Which it also has.