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.

Fair points.

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.