> I had no idea it was such a controversial topic.

I find this statement hard to believe, for reasons that might become more clear as I explain the history that makes your remarks controversial. For the time being, I'm going to assume good faith, and I'll revisit this [suspended] disbelief at the end.

In another comment, you said:

> On a personal note, it's not my cup of tea, but that's cool, there's a million tech blogs without sexualized mascot drawings.

There's a long history of people on technical forums (HN, Reddit, Lobsters, Slashdot, etc.) assuming that furry art is inherently sexual. I blogged about this topic before. https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post...

The history of the "furry is sexual" premise can be traced back to imageboard culture (i.e. 4chan), which got its start from Something Awful, which was the origin of a lot of anti-furry sentiment. This hatred of furries was rooted in queerphobia. See: https://archive.ph/fX8Jo

> A huge, huge motivation for early furry hate was homophobia. That remained the one axis on which we (non-furry dweebs) could punch down, no matter the stated justification. Furries helped mainstream majority-queer online spaces. That made them easy to mock, because they were unashamed enough to be public with their weird art and their dragon wings and their rejection of all the suffocating norms that still make mainstream geek culture an unrelenting hell.

> That invited scorn. It hurt to see others free of the shames that wracked us so. Disgust was the immediate response, a kind of unbodying rejection which would seek to purge any otherness from ourselves. Some of us knew it to be queerphobia, and I'm sure that was the motivation for a lot of the early trolling. Others just wanted to be part of the in-group, and there was no easier way to do that than take a swing at a designated punching bag.

> Something Awful had a particular response to furries. After creating a subforum specifically for furries to post in, everyone who used it was marked with a custom yellow star avatar, then banned.

This meme of hating furries has far-reaching echoes today, with dumb rumors being whipped up all over the country in order to fan the flames against LGBTQIA+ people: https://dogpatch.press/2022/05/23/furries-schools-hoax-map/

You might be wondering, "What's the link between furry and LGBTQIA+ people?"

Well, the best statistical estimates I can find for queer people in America put us at about 5% to 10% of the population. Conversely, about 80% of the furry fandom is LGBTQIA+. https://furscience.com/research-findings/sex-relationships-p...

The "most furries are gay" thing was the premise of how SomethingAwful treated us in the early 2000's: https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

There is also a common sentiment that LGBT people merely existing is "going too far". e.g. https://twitter.com/XydexxUnicorn/status/1528420587001065474

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So, given that historical context, when someone comments on a technical blog post that they couldn't get past the art (followed by "Maybe separate interests." as a standalone sentence, which comes across as snarky and condescending), and offer up a defense that boils down to "your fursona is too sexualized", it's certainly a red flag.

With multiple data points and doubling down, it becomes very challenging to not read that as an unstated "teehee I'm going to dog-whistle my way around overtly breaking the rules while still signaling anti-furry hate and there's nothing you can do about it, because I'll just play stupid if you call me on it". I deal with this a lot from tech people. To wit: https://soatok.blog/2021/03/04/no-gates-no-keepers/

I'm not saying that's what you're doing or how you feel. This is simply how it comes across to my peers and myself. Only you know what you feel in your heart and believe in your mind.

But that's why dismissing technical articles because of cartoon animal characters and calling them "too sexualized" is likely to be controversial on Hacker News comments.

I hope you find this information helpful for future interactions with furries on Hacker News, because we're not going away.