You know one of the reasons you see the "trend" is people keep upvoting tiny things like this.

I do. It's a hard problem! How do you know when a new phenomenon crosses the line from "minor issue which probably means your attention's being hijacked if you're worried about it" to "big thing that needs to be argued against or everyone's gonna start doing it"? I don't have a great answer, other than to say that inclusive language bots subjectively feel to me like they're now in the second bucket. I'd bet $20 that within a decade some major tech company will implement inclusive language rules into every team's linter.

And? Who cares? The linter won't letMeDoSnakeCase? I move on.

Is this worth our time to complain about this and upvote to number ONE article on HN?

I wouldn't argue that this is a tremendously impactful problem, but that's not what "top of HN" represents and doesn't mean that it's not worth our time. If you don't think language is an important topic, it won't really matter to you which side of this argument wins, and you can just kinda skip over it the same way I skip the hardware posts on the frontpage.

If you do think language is an important topic, I think you should do some reflection on why that is, and how similar motivations might be driving people to feel it's important to argue against this kind of bot. It's easy to accidentally fall into an attitude where whatever things I personally don't mind are implicitly "neutral", and so anyone who argues against them must be looking for things to get mad about.

> If you don't think language is an important topic,

This doesn't follow from anything I've said.

> it's important to argue against this kind of bot.

But is it? What's the magnitude of this problem?

The effect of the problem is that, if the inclusive language bots win (which I'm confident they will absent some kind of counterargument), I'll have to communicate in a form of English I consider awkward and stilted and I'll have to implicitly endorse a couple of political stances about the concept of gender neutrality I don't agree with. I don't know how to quantify that into a "magnitude", but I don't think that's a precondition for discussing the issues of the day.

> if the inclusive language bots win

I've worked in SF and this is the first one I've seen.

> I don't know how to quantify that into a "magnitude", but I don't think that's a precondition for discussing the issues of the day.

Sure! You go ahead and prioritize your brainspace the way you want - but I'm frustrated that I keep having to see culture war crap because people dug up the one twitter user or github user with a bad take. And I'm frustrated that otherwise reasonable people turn into moralizing frenzy-bots as arbitrary and poorly conceived as a bot that changes "man page" into "person page", when they see that tiny sliver of takes.

I don't mean this as a gotcha, but you don't have to see culture war crap! It's a lesson I personally learned this lesson much later in life than I should have. If "Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub" doesn't sound like a topic you want to talk about, it's 100% okay to not click into the comments section. (It's not even on the front page anymore - these kinds of posts tend not to last long there.)

As above, if it did sound like a topic you want to talk about, I think you should reflect on why that is and why people who aren't "moralizing frenzy-bots" might nevertheless want to talk about how they don't like it. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I've seen a lot of people say "I can't believe we're arguing about this nonsense" with the strong expectation that the result shouldn't be no conversation but a conversation where everyone agrees.

> I don't mean this as a gotcha, but you don't have to see culture war crap!

This article was, albeit briefly, number one on hackernews.

> I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I've seen a lot of people say "I can't believe we're arguing about this nonsense" with the strong expectation that the result shouldn't be no conversation but a conversation where everyone agrees.

Except, what you're effectively saying is you want a conversation where everyone agrees, because you don't want the people that think this is vacuous nonsense, to engage.

Those PRs are open whether we upvote this submission or not. Putting your head in the sand and pretending something isn't happening has never really worked, better to at least try to have some discourse.

Is this poorly coded bot newsworthy, or even notable? Why?

Nobody knows, HN doesn't have an editor to ask. Much like the stock market nobody knows why stories get upvoted or not or stocks go up or down. The hivemind does what the hivemind does (with a caveat for astroturfing and brigading).

That is the reason that every social media site which has a like or upvote should also have a dislike or downvote. That way you can signal, that you have a reaction to it, but you don't want to spread it further.

Unfortunately, many of these sites rely on ad revenue, and a hate watch with a dislike still provides ad revenue.

> We've had two different new hires try to set up Slack bots with autoresponse complaints whenever someone says "guys", and now I know it's not just some weird idea they both happened to have.

Why are new hires allowed to make bots on a company Slack server. Take away their privileges. Problem solved.

Well, why not? People deciding to code Slack bots on their own initiative has done a lot of good for us, and the problem was easily solved in both cases by removing the slack bots and (I've heard secondhand) a short private conversation about it. If we ever get to a point where leaders aren't willing to push back against a "guys" bot, presumably anyone who wants to build one would be able to get through whatever approval process could be put in place.