this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2021
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Lemmy
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If you let one Nazi drink at your bar, even if he's not bugging anyone or doing anything, you'll find very quickly that it becomes a Nazi bar -most other patrons will leave because they don't feel safe or comfortable
Don't know much about the slur filters myself, but it does make me wonder about the type of characters that would fight so hard to allow the use of more slurs.
You start letting people freely express hate, passively, sarcastically or otherwise, it's gonna turn into that type forum community. Really depends on who the team is interested in catering to. Personally, I stopped using Reddit for that exact reason. Tired of hearing reasons why people think they're better than everyone else, or why x group is inherently evil or why abortion is evil etc. It's a waste of time, and I'm not keen on seeing things that I know are going to make people feel unsafe
Some of the complaints are that the filter is too trigger-happy, and that it doesn't (or didn't until it was patched) respect languages other than English. Problems with this sort of filtering are known since at least 1996, when AOL banned the entire town of Scunthorpe. It's one thing to consider this a reasonable price to pay for keeping nazis out, but it's disingenuous to say that everyone who doesn't agree must be a nazi themselves.
I have defended the word filter here on numerous occasions, but I think not having a word filter is an equally valid design choice, for the reasons you have cited - as long as the human moderators keep on top of it.