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Comment by philipwhiuk | Hacker News Reader

Why are you needlessly gendering your post (especially as it's wrong)

I agree with you but I don’t think your confrontational tone is helpful. I think this comment does roughly the same thing, better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44890782

[flagged]

The only constant on the internet discussion is someone disagrees. Ironically, maybe largely in part from the lack of things like "actual" tone.

HN and the knee-jerk dismissal “why do we need this as a service, it’s trivial to script” on Show HN’s…ala Dropbox launch

Kneejerk reactions about everything happen on HN, as they do on every other forum, but that telling of the Dropbox story is inaccurate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42392302

I considered the blunt approach but some people find that ruder.

Writing ungendered text is exhausting?

Writing "they care" is soooo many more characters than "he cares"!

It's not about the writing. It's about the fact you even have to consider that people might start correcting you in a way that suggests you were less than forthright in your assumptions (this happens a lot these days).

Someone just responding "She." to a comment that misinterpreted gender is just a correction.

I'm having trouble understanding your perspective.

> It's not about the writing.

But earlier you said:

> Writing ungendered text is exhausting?

So are you saying that being careful with pronouns is exhausting, or that others correcting you is exhausting? If it's the latter, I find that defaulting to ungendered pronouns results in fewer corrections (though even that bothers some people; you can't make everyone happy).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com