r/SpeedOfLobsters

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.

I am supposed to be doing work