I'm not an American, and I'm not prude. I use quite a few swearwords regularly. However this just strikes me as an immature thing to do.

> American prudishness

Sounds like you need a review of: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Or perhaps just some common decency ? If you want a tool / platform to take off, using the word 'fuck' is not the way to go.

I too read those guidelines in their entirety and there is nothing there at all about the poignant use of so-called "swear words."

Also:

http://thefuckingweather.com/

http://www.whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/

etc.

Which part of the guidelines? I reread the entire thing and didn't find where it would apply.

Swear words don't break the HN guidelines. When we ask for civility we have in mind how people treat one another online. Swear words can be used to treat others badly, but they have plenty of other uses.

It's not a trivial question, though, and people aren't wrong to disagree. Cultural differences make for very different views here. In some (sub-)cultures swear words are uncivil and in others they are innocuous. There's no model that satisfies all these norms, so inevitably we have to disappoint some.

As a consequence of the above, we don't bowdlerize titles either.

> swearing

Most actual instances of the actual word "fuck" aren't even swears.

"When I first opened Tropic of Cancer and saw that it was full of unprintable words, my immediate reaction was a refusal to be impressed."