But what if I want to swear, but I want to censor the swear word, even superficially (replace a vowel with something else, leaving the swear entirely readable where everyone can easily tell what swear is being used)? This is where I’m seeing a ton of people suddenly not as okay with people doing what they want, and that’s what I was trying to get at with this comment chain. Why are people so upset at people censoring themselves in this way?

Someone else already has pointed it out under this post, but no matter, it bears repeating. The initial need to use these censored forms of swear words rises from corporate censorship, all kinds of web services have been auto moderated to remove a preset list of words, and replacing a single character might get around such a simple limitation. This is understandable, and a good way to stick it to the corporations worried about spoiling their image. (Filter lists like this are also a copout when it comes to bigotry, corporations can cheap out on moderation and pretend no one is calling anyone nasty names when those words are not allowed.)

People tend to assimilate behavior they see every day, though, so a good chunk of the population has begun to see this kind of censorship dodging as some sort of modest or proper behavior. It never was about not offending our peers, though, so this change in internet etiquette is more succumbing to corporate brainwashing than being considerate. I'm sure there are people who do get upset from seeing crass language, but a human will have no trouble being equally offended about someone saying "F*ck cops!" rather than "Fuck cops!". A stupid censorship filter might still be fooled, though. Using the self censored forms where there are no such filters feels like bowing to our overlords a bit too much.