I've been (occasionally) experimenting with slight bowderilisation. For better or worse, less swearing tends to go over slightly better. I can assure you the feeling was there in the original.
My general administrative announcement (NSFW langauge):
Thing is I felt distracted by the amount of swearing, and the fake swears just exaggerated that. I don't care about the swearing in principle, it just felt misplaced in your article, in particular in this censored form.
Swearing helps convey frustration etc. and I guess that's what you were going for, but it doesn't actually work for me (as the reader) in all cases and in particular when it's "redacted".
Not that my opinion matters. I didn't intend this comment to be taken as serious discussion item and maybe I should have just not commented.
I wrote that some three years ago, among a series of rants (I don't recall the others that accompanied it), moved to extreme annoyance, and after looking at the initial result, decided to replace the initial language to tone it down a bit.
Today I tossed it into the HN submissions queue following an earlier item on similarly obnoxious and undiscoverable UI/UX, and was surprised to see the item take off. Planning which HN submissions will succeed is not a high-probability endeavour.
The best way to read the language is "yeah, the author was pretty annoyed when they wrote this, but decided to tone down the effect without removing all references to that annoyance entirely".
I've written highly invecitve-filled pieces elsewhere. For public or private consumption. It's when I stop any swearing that feedback (and usage) is quite likely to stop -- the outrage is a measure that I still care. Users past caring don't remain long.
We don't swear because it's necessary to convey the base information about something. We swear because it's useful to convey our feelings/emotional state/anger about it.
And of all things you could comment, not only is this not related to the topic of TFA at all, but it's also inconsequential, to the point of being some personal peculiarity... Who cares if he uses the "real" swear words or not?
Yes, it is off topic and I don't expect a full treatment of the pros and cons. However, it is certainly not the first time that people have commented on non content of a submission, e.g. bad color choice, hard to read, style, etc.
The thing is I felt the amount of swearing was distracting, and not using the actual word then made these swears stick out even more, distracting further from the content.
