Yes, half of my entire political ideology is based on posts written by 12 year olds on the Internet. The other half is based on posts written by dogs[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots.

> Yep, it's either dogs or r̸u̸s̸s̸i̸a̸n̸ chinese bots.

Please consider users of screen readers and other assistive technologies, as your nonstandard usage of nonstandard characters makes parsing your comment difficult if not impossible. Not a slight or a correction, as I am a fan of Zalgo text myself, but after being informed by others about how inscrutable it can be to the differently abled, I have reconsidered using it.

Didn't realize that, thanks!

I wonder if the future of screen reading applications is bypassing these issues + avoiding parsing weird websites by just doing AI driven OCR.

TalkBack on Android seems to read it just fine, assumedly without needing any fancy AI or OCR

I used to use Zalgo text to make it harder to read my name when I use it, as I use my “real name” and didn’t want it to be scraped by bots, but some folks literally blocked me on social media after a bit of a spat that I’ll admit was caused by a misunderstanding on my part. Apparently, these kinds of characters’ interpretations are context-specific, and using them as a person as strike-throughs is readily apparent for some, but while the meaning is possible to be deduced by an AI, it shouldn’t be expected or assumed to be understood. My HN username in Zalgo text was taking over 30 seconds to read all of the diacritics per post on platforms I used it on, so I had to change my ways or admit that I didn’t care about the experience others had, the latter of which couldn’t be further from the truth.

AI has a hard time deriving how many r’s are in strawberry, so I won’t expect it to parse my text on behalf of others any time soon, though I don’t think you meant any harm. In the interest of respect for those who don’t have a choice in using tech to help them do what comes easily and naturally to me, I thought I’d pay forward the knowledge of how the world and our perceptions of it is as unique as every individual.

Jfc, not everything is about that.

I meant it as an example of--road to hell paved with good intentions and "and naively failed to recognise the damage they were doing".

But you do you.

That's extremely tangential. Bringing hot-button political topics into unrelated threads flattens everything into political arguments and starves all other topics of oxygen.

More specifically, it gets important HN discussions quickly flagged and dropped.