This is the first in a series of new sites I’ve launched which had been sitting in my list of domain names as placeholders. Long ago, I’d get an idea, buy some domain names, and lose interest. Many of these domain names I’d let lapse, but a few I would keep convinced I’d do something someday. I decided now’s the time. This particular site came together in concept and execution over about a week during Christmas break of 2022. The terms and getting those posted took another couple of weeks. but now it’s on autopilot. Here’s the story…
The genesis for this project was a paper called “Potentially Problematic Common Names in North American Public Gardens” with a section on naming which included a super small font collection of offensive (and sometimes puzzling) terms to be avoided. In normal size, was a warning to zoom in to see the terms, hoping that intentionally doing so should prepare the reader for what they’re about to see.
The idea that you can’t write some words makes warnings around them an interesting challenge. Creating a site containing exclusively offensive content seemed like an interesting challenge to tackle.
In this case, a community driven scoring system is a perfect solution because there are always people who have no idea how some terms could even be considered offensive by anyone, while another person is highly offended by the same term. No one person can say what is offensive; agree or not, the reality is it depends on consensus among people who may fundamentally disagree with one another.
I decided not to define the terms but to provide links. And not to host comments but to direct such to linked Twitter posts which are automatically created for each term. My hope is that this solution should have the side benefit of promoting the site as a resource for the ratings themselves.
With each new term posting a reciprocal link to Twitter/X, I couldn’t post huge collections of words all at once. I scraped a number of official resources for terms and scheduled them to post every few minutes over the period of several days to avoid being shut down for spamming Twitter.
Unfortunately, an account that does nothing but post offensive words is not exactly something the Twitter algorithm tends to shine a light on. After 90 days I paid for a blue check and got marginally better exposure but threw in the towel after another 90 days.
Apart from being a reference for scores alone, I also created several dirty-word lists based on current scores to leverage on several moderation platforms.
We’ll see if anything becomes of it, but it’s self-sustaining now, just waiting for to be cited as a source by an influencer to make its presence known to a broader audience.