We’re not interested in censoring speech; we are all about facilitating it. So cuss words aren’t important to our mission, but proper writing is. While we do allow people as young as 13 to sign up, it’s a self-selecting environment. Only a very mature 13 year old is likely to stick around. And let’s be honest…were any of us not already familiar with curse words by the time we were 13?
That said, there is a reason we ask people to keep the raunchy stuff confined to NSFW threads <cough, @ucme, cough>.
The founders made the rules in the beginning, but they originally didn’t have moderators to enforce the rules. When the site did get moderators, the enforcement was initially sort of lax. As the site grew, enforcement became more important and we got stricter about it.
@YARNLADY As @uberbatman mentioned, swearing has always been allowed.