Y’know, I’m someone who gets unreasonably annoyed when encountering an unfamiliar acronym, but even I think banning someone for using one is going too far.

That said, none of these acronyms are without enough context to figure out what they are. Everyone knows what LOL means. USAID is an acronym where the acronym describes what the organization does. CJR is present in a thread about Columbia Journalism Review.

As a general rule, if you define your Three Letter Acronyms (TLA), then they’re no longer a barrier to understanding. And then you can use whatever TLA you like. See how easy that is?

Where they banned LOL and a reaction gif, if I had to guess the rule being violated would be about low-effort discussion. And again, I kind of sympathise with the desire to have meaningful discussion and I see where getting a message that just says “lol” could take the wind out of your sails. Banning is still overkill and alienating to your users though.

There’s a certain amount of irony if you consider a rule against low-effort discussion in a community that was made with such low-effort that they didn’t define and publish their rules