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Comment by exikyut | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any more info about this?

I'm not sure what you mean and imagining people in AU going through accent training to sound like they're from the US... please tell me it's not that bad

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One notable difference is the c-word, which is a gendered slur in the US, but not in Scotland or Australia.

I'm self censoring here because this is a US-run site and I'm afraid I'll get shadowbanned if I use it in full. I am not from the US and this word does not carry the same weight for me.

If I'm going to be censored for saying "cunt" I at least hope I don't have to do the censoring myself.

Only a cunt would censor you for saying "cunt".

Also, I find it funny that "cunt" is considered a gendered slew in the US (according to one of the parent comments). Being a cunt has nothing to do with gender, and everything with a character.

> Being a cunt has nothing to do with gender

Surely you see, though, how it could.

I see this argument as similar to the idea that 'bitch' doesn't have to do with gender. If that were true, wouldn't calling someone a 'dog' carry the same weight?

Let's stick with 'asshole'.

The truth remains that in US culture it does have this gendered meaning, and in Scottish and Australian culture it does not.

Context matters. Intent matters.

Context and intent is also the first to go in the censorship witch-hunt.

Google has fired many an engineer that mentioned that.

Why are you surprised? In US usage it refers to female genitalia. I believe the non-US equivilant is 'fanny'.

There's a bit that comedian Bill Burr does where he observes that referring to someone as "that fucking $XXX" is considered racist while "that $XXX motherfucker" isn't and it has to do with the former talking about the group $XXX as a whole and the latter very explicitly (uh, no pun intended) referring to an attribute of an individual.

Yeah as sibling commenters here allude to, I wasn't referring to accents; that's more about content accessibility and your target audience. You won't get your content taken down because of your accent.

It's more about cultural norms of acceptability - curse words are the obvious example but there's broader & more subtle cultural considerations w.r.t. what's acceptable to discuss and how it should be approached.

Depends on whether you're trying to get a large number of viewers, it's always been the case that you conform to a middle ground to get a large audience, if not many people can understand you you're not going to get millions of subscribers

Yeah that's a "problem" but imo that's more of a life problem (appeal to masses) than one emergent from how man-made online systems have been designed (conformance to arbitrary rules applied by a minority of controlling forces).

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