Disable swears, alcohol, smoking, marijuana, gambling, child abuse and neglect, sensitive East Asian politics, sensitive Middle Eastern politics, WWII politics, Late Ottoman genocides, LGB issues, T issues, global warming, nuclear power, HOA issues, vegetarian issues, vegan issues...
To which the obvious counterargument is just “well of course they can stop at just one toggle. That’s not an excuse to have zero toggles”.
The team had heard that most customers only use 5% of Word's copious feature set, and as part of some rewrite the team set about finding out what the 5% were.
And it was most of the feature set. Customer A used these 5%, B these others...
It's easy to say just one option without describing exactly what that should do. L10n raises some questions, for example. Or just two options, or three. Much harder if you want to be specific.
The story you mentioned wasn’t about exclusions from each and every dictionary. It was about tools that do entirely unique things.
I know HN has a long history of struggling with nuance, but surely people must understand that it’s entirely possible to have a toggle to enable/disable the autocomplete adult filter without needing to then have options for every…single…minor…variation of that filter.
Do you make the same argument for everything?
"You shouldn't treat yourself to a takeaway because what if you want more takeaways?"
"You shouldn't buy a car because what if you want more cars?"
etc.
Look what happened to geographical names. Windows still doesn't implement flag emojis because they can't sort out countries.
It's insane to me that people would argue "we don't know when to stop so lets not implement it at all" when you can literally just stop at one toggle if you wanted. It honestly feels like sometimes people look for problems where problems don't exist.