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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

> Isn't it upon those wanting to change...

No. It isn't anymore. Because the loud minority now has the means to globally and publicly destroy you if you say something they dislike. You might lose your job or even your personal safety because of a statement that can be interpreted in some way that someone doesn't like.

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Be realistic, not a single person will suffer consequences for continuing to say "white space".

Perhaps not whitespace, but I think people insisting on using blacklist or master-slave terminology in computing will actually see direct consequences. Plenty of big tech companies have made their engineers scrub such words from their internal codebase, even going so far as to rename the master branch of Git to main.

I am pretty sure that an employee insisting not to abide by this mandate would be reprimanded and even fired if they don't stop.

https://online.stanford.edu/masters-degrees

https://ed.stanford.edu/academics/masters

I am aware it is still being used in many places. Nevertheless, the term has been discouraged by exactly this type of initiative, more successfully in some places rather than others.

https://github.com/github/renaming

https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jun/23/gitbranchname/

A couple of guys were escorted out of a conference and then fired, for making jokes about 'forking' repo's and big 'dongles' [0]. It's a perfect example of the loud minority ruining lives over what most people I know (including women) will consider a harmless joke.

0: https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spirale...

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