this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Whitelist and blacklist were indeed cancelled despite having no racial origin.
There are cultural traditions of using colors as symbols, many of which are harmless -- red for anger, blue for sadness, green for envy. Whitelist and blacklist come from the very long-standing theme of using white to represent good and black to represent evil.
Regardless of how you feel about the origin of those themes, it makes sense to start moving away from them now. Whether intentional or not, they can be harmful and aren't really necessary.
Never liked these debates ~~as "making the words comfortable (to myself, others or both)" (from both sides) matters most.~~
I find that usimg that soundbyte results in people (including me) to not knowing the cultures your refering to and most without being informed assume that their irrelivant (Hence the original reactionary response). Since the debate has in bad faith on nobody's intent became about "comfort", ill give that perspective.
Personally, Allowlist and blocklist "just work" (no discomfort). Blacklist and Whitelist are natural feeling and I fully understood the soundbyte reason. For that I can respect depricating the word but banning it (if thats even the goal) is uncomfortable. Ill happly abandon my position if a good argument is given. For now I subconciosly use what word was already there.
Edit: boilerplate is way too harsh, dont like conforntational tone.
Honestly I haven't heard much rhetoric around anyone banning these terms. But if moving away from them IS good, and the entire catalyst for this conversation is "YouTube chose to use newer, more preferable terms", then isn't that a good thing?
Thats what I wanted to communicate, deprication is a fairly normal part of software. Computer interfaces in all their forms are just contracts of expectation, social contracts are simmlar. Deprication is marking an expectation as a mistake or somhow unhelpful.