Anyway, you're wrong and I think you know it because you said "government-mandated censorship." The first two words clarify the third. This wouldn't be necessary if the third truly implied the first two.

Have you ever heard of the Hays Code? It's quite infamous, you probably have; it was a system of self-imposed censorship from Hollywood to ban scandalous content from movies, such as people kissing or husbands and wives only having a single bed in their bedroom (oh the implications!) But the point is this censorship was self-imposed, there was no act of congress requiring it. The claim that true censorship must come from the government is simply wrong.

> if it's extended to an author reworking their own output, it really loses all sense of meaning.

It doesn't lose all meaning. It loses only the very narrow meaning you wish to impose (probably because it's an ugly word and you don't want to think yourself capable of censoring.)

But even if we erased every single word for fatness from the minds of everybody in existence all in an instant, new words for fatness would be invented the very next instant when people around the world see fatness, can't find a word for it, and invent a new one. Words are tools for conveying understanding. Humans are tool-creating apes; when we need a tool, we make a tool. Remove a slur from people's vocabulary and people will invent a new one.

When I was young, my school had a program for retarded kids, the kids with profound mental disabilities. We also called each other retarded as a mild insult to impugn our friends' intelligence. The teachers and parents hated this, they banned the word retarded and renamed the class for the retarded kids to "Special Education". Anybody caught saying "retarded" would be scolded very severely and denied recess/etc. So what did we do? We started using "special", "special education" and "sped" as insults equivalent to retarded. You can't erase concepts by erasing words, least of all concepts that are so readily observable and self-evidently negative as the state of being mentally retarded or fat. Need a tool, make a tool.

Your reaction to my statement has proved logicalmonster's point: "Most comments on HN on this topic that veer outside of a narrow range of acceptable thoughts, even from those people that generally support this topic, are flagged and killed."

You haven't succeeded in getting my comments flagged, but you called for it. I knew you would, and that's why I made that comment. To give you an opportunity to demonstrate your censorious inclinations.

Also Chris2048 is right:

> No, you don’t need to conduct a study to state your opinions. But at the same time, your opinion is meaningless

This is double-speak. You don't require me to have opinions based on scientific studies, but at the same time my opinions are worthless. That's double-speak.

inb4 "it's not real censorship unless the government does it"

I think these systems are what you make out of them. If you click trashy content, it'll give you trashy content. If you click politically edgy content, you'll get more of that. If you only click on trains, you'll only get trains. Maybe people who complain about these systems have a totally different experience than me, or maybe they don't like what they see when a content recommendation engine holds up a mirror.

As for their perverse incentives and profit motive... if they're bad at anything, it's getting ad views from me.

You have posed this as a question. My answer is yes. But perhaps you don't really mean it as a question, and instead mean it to solicit others to flag my comment to silence my point of view. Is that the case? If so, then logicalmonster was right.

I have spent the past 15 years working in tech in an American west coast city, I have personally known several transgender people in professional and social contexts, and encountered many more. I have also known or encountered innumerable cisgendered men and women. From these experiences, I have concluded that cisgender men are more dangerous than cisgender women, more quick to anger, more prone to aggressive posturing and certainly more prone to physical assault. Do you doubt these observations as well? Will you allow me the ability to conclude anything from my personal experiences, or do you demand that I perform rigorous scientific studies to conclude anything of this sort? I am telling you, in good faith, that it has been my personal observation that I should be wary of cisgendered men and transwomen. Because although both are usually not violent, both exhibit a predilection for aggression that significantly exceeds what I have come to expect from cisgendered women and transmen.

Maybe in the general population, but not in my social circles (which skew young and urban.)

I think this sort of contradiction is evidence of emotionally compromised reasoning.

That sounds like the vegetarians I know. The vegans I know look like cancer patients.

This is a premise from a bygone era. Replace modern farming with integrated permaculture and billions will starve. Such farming techniques only persist in developed countries today as niche activities to amuse yuppies who want to buy some connection to nature at the grocery store.

And besides having to learn that lsof exists, you'd also have to learn that this even more obscure tool exists. And what happens if you prefer for the program to terminate itself gracefully, cleaning up whatever mess it might have made, instead of sending SIGKILL? Now you have to look up the PID or program name anyway, probably using lsof..