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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

> I hate the word "silently" in headlines like these.

Why hate reporting that fairly represents what they did?

> How else are the supposed to do it? By throwing a press event?

Sure. That's one way to uphold the standards of full transparency about what changes are happening and when - that Unity promised.

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Deleting things never makes a sound. The word silently is added entirely for the connotation that it was meant to be secret. Since such an action would never go unnoticed, it's obvious that it wasn't meant to be secret, so that word is clearly misplaced. If the author wanted to imply it was bad, they should just come out and say it, with a word like despicably.

Here's the blog post where they announced they were creating a github repo: https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-an...

It's the easiest thing in the world to write another blog post announcing they're deleting the github repo.

https://archive.ph/LZRFz

Have they announced anywhere that this is being deleted?

As you noted, deleting something doesn’t make a sound. So if they don’t voluntarily make a sound, then they have silently deleted it.

Silently doesn't have to literally mean without sound. When referring to written mediums it just means without notice. It implies that they hoped for it to go unnoticed because that's exactly it, if they weren't concerned about being secretive they'd take the time to announce it somewhere.

We have a word for this: metaphor! It is building the imagery of a thief silently sneaking into the GitHub offices, and stealing the terms of service.

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