Comment by shevy-java

> I've never really understood the point of self-censorship.

Some platforms disallow certain words. In order to bypass that, some people use the asterisks. That's just as one possible answer to your question; there can be many different reasons for self-censorship, but to me the most logical one is when one tries to work around crappy restrictions, such as on terrible reddit (they killed old.reddit recently; I retired before that due to moderators being insane, but I also said that if old.reddit is gone, I am gone anyway - the requirement to now log in, totally defeats old.reddit com's usecase. Then again reddit went downhill many years before that already, so not a real loss.)