Corporate personhood at its finest.
From the oxford dictionary:
Noun: speak to or treat with disrespect or scornful abuse.
Verb: a disrespectful or scornfully abusive remark or act.
Note the lack of personhood in those definitions. I can insult an object, event, person, corporation or even an idea.
If it offends you so much that people call your work as it is, you should do better work, grow some thicker skin, or stop.
Maybe there are still some teams deep inside the bowels of Microsoft that management has forgotten about that still operate like that, but judging by the way the user-facing parts of its products have developed, the mass firings, and the pushing of AI-driven development by upper management, it seems very clear to me that there's very little risk of insulting anything anyone actually cares about.
"M$" may not be insulting in itself, but it's certainly typically associated with insultingly poor writing.
There has not.
In notepad.
They can do a bad thing, and then you can make fun of it with an insult.
Own it, the insult is warranted, why hide and pretend it's not an insult.
If Microsoft is consistently shipping slop, then they deserve insults over it; not every "bad" thing is always unwarranted. Locking someone in a box is "bad", prison is a necessary thing that benefits society. Insults are "bad" and sometimes warranted.
I suspect not.
So... 4chan? Why would you possibly want that in this context?
Although, you're posting on HN so it's probably fair to assume that "open and frank discussion" isn't a very high priority for you.
Nobody cares about banning the few idiots who do nothing but spam "MICROSLOP SUCKS MICROSLOP SUCKS". But banning the entire term "microslop", just in case someone might use it? Well, what kind of response were they expecting?
Because the decision was made by some normal adult without mental health issues who hasn't internalized just how disturbed some people on the internet are?
It really shouldn't be unreasonable for moderators to try to maintain a professional tone. Although in this case they certainly picked the wrong platform if "professional" was what they were going for.
Keyword bans are definitely a heavy-handed option, they do risk the Streisand effect, and in the worst case that can require the scorched-earth counterresponse described in the source article. But sometimes there's just no other way to kill the meme.
I don't think so. I think we all know how we'd react if we heard someone casually using "microslop" in real life. They'd seem like they're larping as a Silicon Valley character or something.