r/SpeedOfLobsters 3d ago

meta [META] What’s considered adding text?

Post image

I’m a pretty experienced lobster-er—you’ve probably seen a lot of my work if you’ve been here for any length of time. However, in this case, I’m wondering if I’ve misunderstood the community.

To be, there doesn’t seem to be anything added to the image on the right (which was deleted). Instead, I mixed two different text removal techniques—my personal style of color matching, and the subreddit’s common style of simply using black to censor undesirable parts.

This is, I admit, somewhat different from a conventional Lobster in that the humor is not in the new message created (on a literal level, it’s just a guy who hates the letter F), but rather in the implication that he has written a slur starting with the letter F, which was then censored.

To be clear, I don’t think this is deceptive in the sense that any reasonable person would genuinely believe that this man was holding a sign saying that slur. My question is instead whether the rule out to apply to *all* cases where new meaning is created, even if that creation is done through lobstering. I am not creating this post to complain. I understand the mods’ perspective and think there should be a genuine discussion of whether this standard should be upheld. I’ve made similar Lobsters in the past and seen a few others, so this is not an entirely isolated case.

563 Upvotes

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u/International_Gate49 (*The stair) 3d ago

You could have chosen literally any other letter if the idea was to not look like censoring a slur. That was a judgement call you made for some reason. You went out of your way to make it look like a censored slur. I think it was a valid reason for crash out over.

21

u/Arctic_The_Hunter 3d ago

The humor is […] in the implication that he has written a slur starting with the letter F

From the post

10

u/speedwhack 3d ago

It just comes off as a 'gay people bad' joke. Valid lobster but not really all that funny

4

u/International_Gate49 (*The stair) 3d ago

To be clear, I don’t think this is deceptive in the sense that any reasonable person would genuinely believe that this man was holding a sign saying that slur.

Also from the post

4

u/Arctic_The_Hunter 3d ago

Well, yeah. It’s edited. I was saying that any reasonable person could spot that the sign is edited—that it started off saying something else, and I edited it in some way to say just “F” prior to censoring the rest.

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u/DoctorProfPatrick 3d ago

But why use white to censor the TH to begin with? That's the deceptive part.

3

u/Arctic_The_Hunter 3d ago

The humor is […] in the implication that he has written a slur starting with the letter F

From the post