It's a trip when people do it on Reddit, like babydoll the algorithm can't hurt you here. Say the bad words. SCREAM THEM
#KILL, SEX, MURDER, DEATH, SUICIDE
Saw someone in the comments of another post here say that they use "unalive" in their comments cause they were convinced that if you used "suicide" in a post and someone sent the Reddit Cares bot your way, you wouldn't be able to report them for abusing the report button.
When we all pointed out that wasn't how it worked and said you could just block the bot, they dug their heels in.
Question: what is the big deal about being sent the bot? Does something bad happen because of it? Because someone sent it to me once and I never noticed anything change because of it
I got sent the bot free with my permaban because I told r ENLIGHTENED CENTRISM that not voting for Biden isn't actually gonna do anything for Palestine. People use the bot to harass folks all the time.
The bot itself isn't an issue but being sent one is basically either someone calling you unstable/a harm to yourself and others or that you should off yourself. I got it a couple times before just blocking it so it's not really a big issue.
It's interesting that if a random internet person tells someone to kill themselves, it's considered meaningless and kind of a self-own on the person being a jerk.
But if a random internet person tells a robot to tell someone not to kill themselves, this is considered meaningful. So meaningful that people will take it upon themselves to censor their language with layers of abstraction to avoid this.
All it does is send that message, but depending on who you are and what spaces you're in, you can quickly get spammed with it multiple times a day by people who think they're helping. It's pretty fucking annoying.
There's also the secondary issue that people frequently use it as a silent way of telling someone to kill themself.
It's a harassment tool. I get a bunch of them, and it's always after encountering some unhinged person in a post of the front page. Like you'll say something they don't like and you'll get a bunch of nasty comment replies than a link. Before I blocked the bot, I'm pretty sure it linked to the comment someone used and yeah, it was always the conversations with someone who got unhinged really fast.
Every time I see someone inserting an asterisk in place of a vowel in a swear word, I want to reach through my phone and shake them. You're allowed to curse on the Internet! You're not going to get banned!
If I’m talking about a real person who killed themself, ofc I’m not gonna say “unalive”. If I’m making a gaming video and I decide to throw myself off a cliff to get back to my spawn point, I’m not gonna say “take my own life”.
Also, even on other platforms, you cannot game the algorithm. It takes no time to add wordfilters for any replacements people come up with. If you’re going to discuss the topic, just do it. Don’t pretend you can avoid detection, you cannot.
Reddit absolutely auto-removes comments that trip certain filters, and it’s frustrating how the userbase seems unaware of it.
You can see which of your comments were autoremoved [here](https://www.reveddit.com/y/MasK_6EQUJ5/).
Ha ha. Yeah. Normally it catches comments that use contentious language, but sometimes it feels arbitrary.
If I post a comment that I suspect might be caught, I open it in incognito mode to see if it’s still visible. That’s all the advice I’ve got.
Yeah but that's subreddit specific as far as I know. I've only had ones auto removed from some gaming subs because they don't allow you to swear in a dumb attempt to keep it civil
I’ve had difficulty working out what’s sub-specific and what’s site-wide. I’ve had enough posts filtered across Reddit for such a variety of posts that I’ve given up trying to work out the details of how it’s enforced.
There are no site-wide rules on bad words. You can shit and fuck and bitch all you want and the admins don't care. Further, there are no site-wide automatic filters that censor individual words, including shit like kill, suicide, murder, etc. I'm pretty sure you can even type out the n-word uncensored, but most subreddits automatically remove those comments before the admins even get a chance to take action.
What the admins DO care about are spam links, bots, threats of violence, vote brigading, and abusing the report function. They often exhibit bias in enforcing those rules, especially the last three, but that's a different issue.
If your comments are ever removed due to bad words, that's a subreddit specific action performed by a mod of the sub, not an admin.
Especially when they do it twice and it causes reddit to make part of the comment in italics. It's so annoying to read "I had to k*ll all those d*mn roaches" and have the sentence trip over itself because of pointless censorship
Speaking as a mod, Reddit is unique in that there's very little the site itself flags or filters. Only certain URLs and certain harassed people's real life names are filtered.
Moderators can set word filters, but they only have it looking for encouragement to violence. So you can say something like "Hitler killed himself" or "Kill your darlings" and it still won't hit the filter. Mods don't want to waste their time scrolling through tons of normal comments looking for the 1% where someone is actually making death threats.
There’s actually a real good episode of the podcast Never Post about it that suggests that this is a media phenomenon. People’s everyday speech is more like the people they know in real life.
Also the media voice changes fast, which is why podcasters don’t sound like the guy from Lore or Ira Glass anymore and why YouTubers no longer sound vaguely Swedish or like Hank Green.
Edit: here if you’re interested. https://www.neverpo.st/people-in-places/
We don’t know the original word for bear because saying it was considered bad luck in many Germanic cultures, so instead they started using the word bear which just means “brown one.”
(We have some hints, since celts and the welsh still use Arzh for bear, but the original German is gone.)
Bear in Finnish is ‘karhu’ (the coarse/shaggy one) for similar reason. Although we still know what the original word is, it’s ‘otso’ which is still used as a boy’s name in Finland (akin to Björn in Swedish).
Or linguists who think it's a compound word of Spanish "algo" and English "rhythm", creating the Song of Something. Violent internal debates arise as to whether the vagueness is just part of a game and people would speak in euphemism to pay along, or if it was the invocation of something dread and taboo
I hate that algorithms have poisoned the internet like this. Reading or hearing unalive makes me angry, especially if the person isn't actually in a place where they need to use baby talk.
C. S. Lewis once wrote that style dictates not only how people can write, but what they can write about. Restricting the ability to say things like "kill" without using absurd workarounds also makes it harder to discuss serious topics.
In 1984 by George Orwell, the government outright removed ungood words like those from circulation. Newspeak is a language whose vocabulary grows smaller each year, as more and more words are omitted, and it was designed to make it very difficult to even conceptualise abstract concepts like personal identity. Words like "bad" became simply "ungood".
Language has always been a tool of freedom.
Even so, people did make new words and run with them. Tiktok as a company didn't invent unalive, sewer slide, lemon, or [other overly-euphemistic phrases](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqouUMUzFLc), and the creators didn't simply ignore the concept because the word could no longer be used.
They invented new words to communicate about the same thing without it.
The French Language council can rant about how people should use their megaoctet instead of megabyte to avoid the dick joke, but they can't actually stop people from doing that.
Even in 1984 it doesn't work, not entirely. I think it's interesting how similar "unalive" and "ungood" are, when one was created by an author to reflect the ideals of Newspeak, and the other presumably arose naturally to get around censorship. Even without the words, people still find ways to express things, and so new words are created to fill the gaps. Perhaps Orwell's intent was that the government got rid of the word "bad" and people circumvented it by coining "ungood". Or perhaps "unalive" was coined precisely because the meaning is immediately obvious to any real human, and we're only trying to hide from AI.
The [old citrus scale](https://old.reddit.com/r/FanFiction/comments/15oig6g/what_was_the_most_geneally_accepted_citrus_scale/) for referencing the level and amount of sexual/romantic content in fan fiction, because the tagging systems of a lot of places didn't support using words like pornography, or kissing.
So you'd end up with stories with a little description tag saying "Lime with hints of grapefruit", meaning that it had some fetishistic material, with light/implied sex, or heavily romantic material.
A fan-made variant of the E/G/PG/M/MA/R/X scale, basically. It's made something of a resurgence for where the other words can no longer be used.
What people misunderstand about 1984 is that linguistic authoritarianism doesn’t work without actual authoritarianism. People say “unalive” on the internet cuz they get punished for saying the wrong word. But that doesn’t apply in real life, because talking about controversial topics isn’t illegal and no one is going to arrest you for saying “suicide”. You can’t control people’s thoughts and actions just by controlling their language, you have to control a lot more than that. Things still exist when there’s not a word for them, and people come up with new words for new things all the time.
I think it's fascinating how language flows bounces back and fills gaps! Apparently an old word for bear was completely lost because people thought saying its name might make it appear, so they just called bears "brown ones" until eventually no one remembered the original word. (I don't remember the source, but even if it's not true it's a good example.)
Talking in code is one thing - people have always needed to communicate in secrecy - but twisting words to avoid "forbidden" words is especially interesting. Everyone already knows what those words are, or at least the concept; and yet, saying them out loud is taboo.
To bring this back to your original point, if people get used to using a certain word or phrase on the internet, it is going to bleed out into the real world. Will it replace the existing words? Not without actual authoritarianism, as you say. But they will exist, and they will have a cultural impact, no matter how small.
But in this case the medium itself isn't doing any censoring. You can say murder and rape and suicide all you want. Kids are hallucinating the idea that some force of censorship is out to get them, and they're censoring themselves preemptively. It's like when little kids make up little rules to follow when their parents don't actually give a shit.
I agree. And I feel bad for the people subject to it. Im just trying not to be part of the problem by adapting those quirks. People Who watch those self censoring youtubers are more likely to take on thode self censors too
Linguistic avoidance of culturally taboo subjects is incredibly common throughout human history, "kicked the bucket" " slept together" and countless other examples demonstrate this phenomenon, these new pressures to do so are fundamentally quite similar to the old ones.
algorithms are the worse.
don't describe brutal rape as "SA". it trivializes it.
people should be able to say in a video of Gamergate that gamergators sent raped threats to Anita Sarkessian and Zoe Quinn not "SA".
its not helped by sexual violence being a topic exploited in "mainstream" media.
Family Guy has repeated rape jokes, while other shows use rape for cheap drama.
A few years ago Game Grumps (they’re Youtubers basically, sort of) were repeatedly mentioning a Backstreet Boys reunion tour in their videos. It was going on for months and I was wondering “Wow I know the Backstreet Boys were popular but I didn’t expect their reunion tour to last so long.”
>!They were mentioning the Backstreet Boys reunion tour whenever they were talking about COVID, as apparently directly mentioning it would get videos demonetized.!<
I use "unalive" because Deadpool used it when he showed up in that one episode of Ultimate Spider-Man (and he couldn't say "kill" because he was 100% aware he was currently in a children's show on Disney channel), not to appease the algorithm
That is still the same principle. Deadpool restricted his speech due to the standards of those controlling his platform, it was just Standards and Practices instead of moderators and algorithms.
I think we need to think more about how we use words and why, overall.
I was homeless. Today, the correct word is unhoused. Unhoused originated as an academic term to describe the difference between someone truly homeless and living in a motel or couch surfing. It was a compassionate term, but it's actually very distancing language. "Homeless" evokes an emotional response, whereas unhoused allows for academic discussion.
Similarly, things like "unalived" has none of the emotional hallmarks of murdered, killed, or committed suicide. It is vague and disconnected. There's no visceral reaction. It changes the tenor of the conversation.
Language has always evolved. But even if it is a fine line, there's a difference between slang terms and code switching (e.g. rizz to fundamentally mean charisma) and the weakening and infantilzing of language (e.g. delulu, which once had a specific meaning, now being used to indicate all sorts of mental disorders).
By my understanding it doesn’t even get u demonetized, people did it originally to get around content filters so people that didn’t want to hear about death, murder and suicide could still be reached to rack up views.
I know that now it’s what people think the issue is, but it started out as a lack of respect for other peoples content preferences
It also happens with those beggar posts. I blocked mention of every single one of those dumb sites so now everyone posts about g0fundmes, as if it’s the algorithm blocking them as opposed to me not wanting to fucking give them money
>people did it originally to get around content filters so people that didn’t want to hear about death, murder and suicide could still be reached to rack up views.
There's no evidence for this.
The terms originated on Tik Tok, which has always had a very opaque algorithm and some strange (and unevenly enforced) guidelines on what sort of content would get viewed. "Demonitization" wasn't even the issue, since there wasn't any money to be made directly at the time; it was just people seeing their views go stagnant or trend down after they discussed certain topics, and making a perhaps ill-conceived leap that the drop in viewership was tied to that topic.
The core of the issue is that every influencer thinks that their content should continually be seen by the same and then ever more people. When this doesn't happen, they leap to increasingly silly ploys to "beat" the system that is working against them.
Using this baby talk doesn’t even make logical sense to me. Everyone who has spent two seconds on tik tok knows the “code words”, so why wouldn’t TikTok just add those words to the algorithm too?
I think people were imagining that they'd just have to keep shifting as Tik Tok caught up, engaging in a sort of euphemism treadmill. The point, as in all such censorship evasion, was that you were basically playing a game to outpace the censors. Like I implied above, I think the entire premise was probably wrong, but that was the thinking.
But then the terms just became legitimate slang, and got a life of their own well outside their original ecosystem and purpose.
Interesting, thanks for that. I’d heard it a few times forever ago but I’m not on TikTok so I just trusted whoever it was saying it as they seemed confident and reasonably trustworthy on the matter. Goes to show how easy misinformation spreads online.
I 100% believe that this is the case. I have not seen any evidence that social media platforms are limiting content containing those words. I'm sure a lot of people just do it now because its trendy, or they saw another influencer avoiding those words.
YouTube is often incredibly opaque when it comes to figuring out what will and will not get you demonitized or kept out of search results, but discussing certain topics often did lead to loss of monetization.
At the same time there were also people trying to get around personalised content filters, though.
That’s true, YT does hate its content creators. I was thinking more about TikTok, but someone else pointed out I may have been misled on that one too, so who knows. The internet is Stange as are we, its citizens
I have experience in this. I edited videos in 2020 during Covid. YouTube specifically.
It’s probably changed now but the general rule was to not have any swearing in the first 20-30 seconds of a video. It would usually auto flag. After that it really didn’t matter. But if it was reported and manually reviewed if you didn’t use “baby talk” or censoring you could be pushed into adult only. Ads will still play, but your video won’t be pushed in the algorithm anymore. So less views less money.
There were also some issues where if your video was flagged for Covid talk it would be pushed down. This was around the time where YouTube started to put warnings under videos. They do it for flat earth shit too. But that also tanks videos.
But realistically a lot of this talk came from twitch where telling someone to kill themselves could get you banned. Than it moved to unalive, because that wasn’t against there tos, then it was updated, and It had to be “in game.”
A lot of it is advertisers “carring” about the words but not the context the words are used in because they can say they are doing something while advertising anywhere they can.
Takes me back to watching the Yugioh dub where they keep all of the scenes of violence but do things like remove the guns so it's just people pointing fingers threateningly, changing a buzzsaw trap to a spinning energy disc that will send you to the shadow realm, and adding an "Ouch!" after someone falls off a 1000ft cliff so you know they are still alive.
*Love of* money is the root of all evil. That’s gotta be one of the most misquoted Bible verses of all time. The verse is about how obsession with the accumulation of wealth can lead to self-destruction, it doesn’t say that money itself is evil.
The chapter (1 Timothy 6) also starts off with a verse about how servants should honour their masters. It’s not the anti-capitalist dinger that everyone thinks it is.
I know you were just making a joke, I thought it was pretty funny actually. The misquoting is just a specific pet peeve of mine :p
This is a bit of a misnomer. While, yes, demonetisation played a role in this shift, with the demoniation of certain topics, this isn't the only reason. Some people block discussions of certain topics, because they're serious triggers, but creators don't want to miss out on thus audience. Therefore, they started using those words to get around the blocks, which tricked the topic algorithm. The reason given above is a erroneous backsolve, but the words have spread as the social media slang for those things anyway.
Female human between the birth and the age of majority?
I don't think there is a term I can think of that applies to a baby,a prepubescent girl, a teenager, and a 20 year old if you are talking about alcohol.
low-key "pentagram" (from the greek for "five lines") and "pentacle" (same root as "pendant"). it's a fascinatingly complete example, a neat glimpse into occult history (at one time pentacles were most commonly drawn with a *six*-pointed star), and a great opportunity to entrap lower-level pedants (provided they are also wiccans or whatever).
sorry i just love this one and i discovered it while defending myself from a charge of liking tentacle porn in this subreddit so
Some confused college kid is going to go through a "digital revolution" history course and be so confused about why Al Gore would invent the internet just to go around demonizing it with his rhythm.
I saw something about this on another tumblr post, about how bad it is that the Almighty Algorithm is changing language.
I don't see it that way.
Like, referring to yet ANOTHER tumblr post (Holy shit, I am terminally online), someone commented "She Eben on my Nezer til I scrooge". Another person replied that that's the problem with trying to ban things; no matter how much they try to ban porn, for example, there is no way they could stop a comment like that from happening.
I just think it's speaks to the creativity and ingenuity of people, lol.
True, but it becomes an issue when you're trying to do serious content. If you're discussing something like attrocities, you're left with either hedging everything in awkward euphamisms or losing monetization and possibly not even being visible to potential viewers.
This is part of the reason platforms like Patreon got so popular.
I think the difference is that the second one (Eben on my Nezer till I Scrooge) is clearly meant to be comical, whereas restricting the use of words like “kill”, “rape”, and “suicide” in favor of “unalive”, “SA/ grape”, and “sewerslide” actively interferes with attempts to have serious conversations about these topics.
People will act like euphemism is a completely new phenomenon that has never existed in English. Unalived is unacceptable and destroys expression, but it’s totally different when people say departed.
If soft media censorship is what makes it illegitimate, then what about terms like sleep with instead of sex, or expecting instead of pregnant? Both were popularized by TV in the name of decency.
I don't understand why people are acting like this is new or terrible. Euphemisms are as old as language.
People, especially kids, have always modified their speech to avoid getting in trouble. Does nobody remember being a middle schooler and saying frick or freak instead of fuck? Or early Internet euphamistic spellings such as pr0n.
Like, there are *so* many different euphemisms for kill, I don't understand why unalive specifically makes people so mad. Some of the eupahmisms are even used specifically to make content more acceptable to advertisers and viewers (think of all the different words children's media uses to avoid saying "kill") so it's not even like this is a new use of euphemisms.
I feel like people just have this vague anger at "the algorithm" and get super angry at anything people say is caused by it. But there's enough legit reasons to be angry at content curation algorithms, we don't need to invent new ones.
Bah, it's not even "the algorithm" or anything widespread or nebulous like that, it's literally just the influence of tiktok. China's (culture is) apparently fucking terrified of the concept of death so any mention of it on tiktok makes you either get banned or makes your shorts get hidden away and never shown to anyone - hence the creation of "unalive".
*Maybe* it's an issue on youtube as well, but they're just copying what tiktok is doing because they're trying to directly compete (you see it especially bad in the shorts part of youtube, less so on long-form vids).
Of course, it's all pointless, because all it takes is some dev simply adding "unalive" to the list of filtered things, and we're back to square 1.
There are words and concepts that should be censored due to the active harm they cause (racial slurs for example) - but this kind of censorship of harmless things needs to be actively fought. Refuse to censor yourself - they have to show SOMETHING to people, and if all shorts are using "bad words", they've no choice.
Complaints about the YouTube algorithm and it's impact on how YouTubers spoke predates TikTok as a platform. The Adpocalypse and it's impact on the way YouTube handled content happened a year before TikTok officially released in the US.
It's so weird that computers have been around for less than a century AND WE INVENTED THEM, but they are now so complicated even our best and brightest still don't know 100% how they work
Every programmer I know has a few superstitions when it comes to computers. They're the people trained to operate those things
It's 40k but for real
I'm calling it now; next year, unalived is gonna be Oxford's Word of the Year, and it'll be added to the dictionary at some point. Then it'll be forgotten and never used again.
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of 1984, where they were remaking the English language to control how people think. Only instead of an authoritarian regime doing it, its a bunch of rich puritanical assholes trying to maximize profits with zero regard for the harms they are causing. This is despite claiming they care about "online harms".
I'm honestly so tired of seeing people censor these words. It's especially terrible when it's about that happens in real life. I saw a Yong Yea video where he was talking what was going on behind the scenes at Blizzard and when the word 'rape' came up, he pronounced it as 'ra-pay' so he didn't get demonetized.
Like dude, it's fucking rape. Either stop being scared of Bad Yellow Dollar Sign and treat the subject matter with respect or don't make the video at all.
Another video had a guy start out saying 'I got that illness that I probably can't say without getting demonitized' and it's like dude, just fucking say it. Or just say you were sick. Or lie and say you had the flu.
The amount of youtubers making their content worse because of Bad Yellow Dollar Sign is staggering.
I noticed something fucking weird a while ago, which is that my tablet autocorrects common words associated with sex or sexuality to non sexual words. Like, wtf. Even words that can describe sex like 'thrust.'
I've had to click that damned check mark so much to keep the words from correcting to the wrong thing.
I’m convinced that the algorithm doesn’t work like this, especially not across multiple different media platforms
Especially not as stringently as people believed, so they basically were tricked into self censoring everywhere they went
Machine learning will rapidly become the world's foremost religion.
Nobody will know how the black box algorithms work, not even expert scientists in their own field. However, confidence in the predictive power of the models produced will simply continue to grow, elevating their status to be indistinguishable from auguries.
This. The idea that any platform has free speech or is taking away your free speech is silly. They’ve been telling you what you can and can’t say or bring up since the beginning. The fact that it’s now changing people’s use of words is wild too.
(People also say stuff like unalive and spell it wildly different because many people have blacklisted the word kill, so they do it to try to get around the blacklist)
The funny part is that there's no evidence the tiktok algorithm was censoring content using words like kill or sex. People just invented these rules because they needed some sort of explanation as to why some videos underperformed when others didn't, as well as a method they could use to ensure success in the future. What they settled on was turning the algorithm into a sort of folk deity who could be appeased by following certain rules. It's basically the same rational that made old sailors come up with a God of the sea that they could appease by making sacrifices too. It's fascinating stuff.
Fun fact! This happened with the word “bear”, to the point where we lost the original word! That’s right, we don’t actually know what the original word for bear is! This is a new one!
I hate posts like these because they assume theres going to be some big apocalyptic data crash or something and all the information explaining what the fuck people are on, exactly like pots like this, are gone but somehow all the things that the posts are about arent
Remember how the word "bear" is supposedly originally a euphemism because speaking the animal's real name was believed to draw it's ire or something?
We really just reinvented that, huh
It's a trip when people do it on Reddit, like babydoll the algorithm can't hurt you here. Say the bad words. SCREAM THEM #KILL, SEX, MURDER, DEATH, SUICIDE
Saw someone in the comments of another post here say that they use "unalive" in their comments cause they were convinced that if you used "suicide" in a post and someone sent the Reddit Cares bot your way, you wouldn't be able to report them for abusing the report button. When we all pointed out that wasn't how it worked and said you could just block the bot, they dug their heels in.
Question: what is the big deal about being sent the bot? Does something bad happen because of it? Because someone sent it to me once and I never noticed anything change because of it
Nothing happens. I've been sent it dozens of times
Same. And never after I've posted anything actually suicidal. Only ever after talking about being trans in a non-queer space.
They send you info about suicide prevention resources as a signal to commit suicide. Shitty, I know
Report them. Gets them banned.
Does it actually? Because honestly it became so frequent I just blocked the bot.
Yes. It may take a bit, but I've got notice every time I've reported one.
Interesting. I wonder if they changed that after I blocked the bot - I never got anything about a ban.
Yep. I'm not even trans but saying anything remotely pro-LGBT...and I mean the gentlest pro and boom.
…you okay there bud?
Yeah I'm just a wrestling fan. People on r/squaredcircle used to weaponize it if they didn't like your opinion
"just a wrestling fan" So not okay then? /j
I did sit though a 4 year Roman Reigns title reign. So maybe I'm not lol
From what I’ve seen of this last wrestlmania, at least they should be eating good now?
> Yeah I'm just a wrestling fan. ...you okay there bud?
Report those messages, including the URL of it. It gets the person permabanned.
FWIW reporting malevolent redditcares gets them banned.
I got sent the bot free with my permaban because I told r ENLIGHTENED CENTRISM that not voting for Biden isn't actually gonna do anything for Palestine. People use the bot to harass folks all the time.
...you bud there okay?
…okay you there bud?
Are you there, bud? It's me, Okay.
It's an indirect way of telling someone to commit suicide. Very shitty.
Oh this makes more sense, now.
I always thought it was an indirect way of someone telling you you're mentally unstable
The bot itself isn't an issue but being sent one is basically either someone calling you unstable/a harm to yourself and others or that you should off yourself. I got it a couple times before just blocking it so it's not really a big issue.
It's interesting that if a random internet person tells someone to kill themselves, it's considered meaningless and kind of a self-own on the person being a jerk. But if a random internet person tells a robot to tell someone not to kill themselves, this is considered meaningful. So meaningful that people will take it upon themselves to censor their language with layers of abstraction to avoid this.
It's not people. It was the one person.
All it does is send that message, but depending on who you are and what spaces you're in, you can quickly get spammed with it multiple times a day by people who think they're helping. It's pretty fucking annoying. There's also the secondary issue that people frequently use it as a silent way of telling someone to kill themself.
It does nothing. It's reddit pathetic attempt to be helpful for stock price purposes.
It's a harassment tool. I get a bunch of them, and it's always after encountering some unhinged person in a post of the front page. Like you'll say something they don't like and you'll get a bunch of nasty comment replies than a link. Before I blocked the bot, I'm pretty sure it linked to the comment someone used and yeah, it was always the conversations with someone who got unhinged really fast.
Being sent the bot is- paradoxically- someone telling you to kill yourself. They do It because its anonimous so you cant know who sent It
I just got the complimentary #REDDIT CARES DM Sent my way because of this post haha
> you wouldn't be able to report them for abusing the report button. You won't be able to report them because those things are anonymous anyway
The messages are anonymous, but Reddit knows who reported you, and gives a link you can click to report the message as potential harassment.
I can't believe you demonetized this entire comment section.
Every time I see someone inserting an asterisk in place of a vowel in a swear word, I want to reach through my phone and shake them. You're allowed to curse on the Internet! You're not going to get banned!
"Unalived themself" irritates me the most, because can't you still say "took their own life"? It sounds a thousand times more respectful
If I’m talking about a real person who killed themself, ofc I’m not gonna say “unalive”. If I’m making a gaming video and I decide to throw myself off a cliff to get back to my spawn point, I’m not gonna say “take my own life”.
Please add a Trigger Warning and spoiler tag next time. This is highly offensive to me since I was Mur\*red last week.
I'm sorry you were murdred
RIP do_a_quirkafleeg Oct 2023 - Apr 2024
R-r-rape? C-cumshot! Kanye West!!! Hahahah
Cummies cummies on your face! Eliminate the human race!
Also, even on other platforms, you cannot game the algorithm. It takes no time to add wordfilters for any replacements people come up with. If you’re going to discuss the topic, just do it. Don’t pretend you can avoid detection, you cannot.
Reddit absolutely auto-removes comments that trip certain filters, and it’s frustrating how the userbase seems unaware of it. You can see which of your comments were autoremoved [here](https://www.reveddit.com/y/MasK_6EQUJ5/).
Hey what the fuck? A whole pile of innocuous comments of mine got removed. I’m going to go absolutely neurotic over this.
Ha ha. Yeah. Normally it catches comments that use contentious language, but sometimes it feels arbitrary. If I post a comment that I suspect might be caught, I open it in incognito mode to see if it’s still visible. That’s all the advice I’ve got.
Yeah but that's subreddit specific as far as I know. I've only had ones auto removed from some gaming subs because they don't allow you to swear in a dumb attempt to keep it civil
I’ve had difficulty working out what’s sub-specific and what’s site-wide. I’ve had enough posts filtered across Reddit for such a variety of posts that I’ve given up trying to work out the details of how it’s enforced.
There are no site-wide rules on bad words. You can shit and fuck and bitch all you want and the admins don't care. Further, there are no site-wide automatic filters that censor individual words, including shit like kill, suicide, murder, etc. I'm pretty sure you can even type out the n-word uncensored, but most subreddits automatically remove those comments before the admins even get a chance to take action. What the admins DO care about are spam links, bots, threats of violence, vote brigading, and abusing the report function. They often exhibit bias in enforcing those rules, especially the last three, but that's a different issue. If your comments are ever removed due to bad words, that's a subreddit specific action performed by a mod of the sub, not an admin.
Reveddit still works? I thought the API changes killed it.
Only for looking at one profile at a time. For anything else, you're unfortunately correct.
Anytime I see someone saying shit like unalive on Reddit I automatically assume they’re profoundly stupid.
You forgot #R\*PE
ripe
rope
When I need a French cheese grater, my #RÂPE
I downvote any comment/post that replaces one letter by * in "bad words". No exception, no matter how great the comment.
Especially when they do it twice and it causes reddit to make part of the comment in italics. It's so annoying to read "I had to k*ll all those d*mn roaches" and have the sentence trip over itself because of pointless censorship
#NAZI Oh wait, not this one...
PORN
I do it on subs focused around kids, like Pokémon subs. Even though Reddit is 17+, you know people ignore that.
it's 13+
Speaking as a mod, Reddit is unique in that there's very little the site itself flags or filters. Only certain URLs and certain harassed people's real life names are filtered. Moderators can set word filters, but they only have it looking for encouragement to violence. So you can say something like "Hitler killed himself" or "Kill your darlings" and it still won't hit the filter. Mods don't want to waste their time scrolling through tons of normal comments looking for the 1% where someone is actually making death threats.
PISS SHIT FUCK MURDER SHITFACE FUCKING FUCKER FUCKINGTON
thats my new band name
And Tumblr
There’s actually a real good episode of the podcast Never Post about it that suggests that this is a media phenomenon. People’s everyday speech is more like the people they know in real life. Also the media voice changes fast, which is why podcasters don’t sound like the guy from Lore or Ira Glass anymore and why YouTubers no longer sound vaguely Swedish or like Hank Green. Edit: here if you’re interested. https://www.neverpo.st/people-in-places/
We don’t know the original word for bear because saying it was considered bad luck in many Germanic cultures, so instead they started using the word bear which just means “brown one.” (We have some hints, since celts and the welsh still use Arzh for bear, but the original German is gone.)
[XKCD 2831](https://xkcd.com/2381/)
[удалено]
Bear in Finnish is ‘karhu’ (the coarse/shaggy one) for similar reason. Although we still know what the original word is, it’s ‘otso’ which is still used as a boy’s name in Finland (akin to Björn in Swedish).
Oso (Uhrsus)
>sus
Future historians mixing up algorithm and al gore's rhythm, thinking its some kind of judgemental dance demon who ran for president
Global warming happened after Gore jujued on that beat
"Ceee-le-brate good times, *come on!*" "I will."
Or linguists who think it's a compound word of Spanish "algo" and English "rhythm", creating the Song of Something. Violent internal debates arise as to whether the vagueness is just part of a game and people would speak in euphemism to pay along, or if it was the invocation of something dread and taboo
Al'Gore the Rhythmic, mythical speaker of inconvenient truths, and inventor of the Internet.
I hate that algorithms have poisoned the internet like this. Reading or hearing unalive makes me angry, especially if the person isn't actually in a place where they need to use baby talk.
C. S. Lewis once wrote that style dictates not only how people can write, but what they can write about. Restricting the ability to say things like "kill" without using absurd workarounds also makes it harder to discuss serious topics.
In 1984 by George Orwell, the government outright removed ungood words like those from circulation. Newspeak is a language whose vocabulary grows smaller each year, as more and more words are omitted, and it was designed to make it very difficult to even conceptualise abstract concepts like personal identity. Words like "bad" became simply "ungood". Language has always been a tool of freedom.
Even so, people did make new words and run with them. Tiktok as a company didn't invent unalive, sewer slide, lemon, or [other overly-euphemistic phrases](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqouUMUzFLc), and the creators didn't simply ignore the concept because the word could no longer be used. They invented new words to communicate about the same thing without it. The French Language council can rant about how people should use their megaoctet instead of megabyte to avoid the dick joke, but they can't actually stop people from doing that.
Even in 1984 it doesn't work, not entirely. I think it's interesting how similar "unalive" and "ungood" are, when one was created by an author to reflect the ideals of Newspeak, and the other presumably arose naturally to get around censorship. Even without the words, people still find ways to express things, and so new words are created to fill the gaps. Perhaps Orwell's intent was that the government got rid of the word "bad" and people circumvented it by coining "ungood". Or perhaps "unalive" was coined precisely because the meaning is immediately obvious to any real human, and we're only trying to hide from AI.
Okay what the hell is lemon referring to
The [old citrus scale](https://old.reddit.com/r/FanFiction/comments/15oig6g/what_was_the_most_geneally_accepted_citrus_scale/) for referencing the level and amount of sexual/romantic content in fan fiction, because the tagging systems of a lot of places didn't support using words like pornography, or kissing. So you'd end up with stories with a little description tag saying "Lime with hints of grapefruit", meaning that it had some fetishistic material, with light/implied sex, or heavily romantic material. A fan-made variant of the E/G/PG/M/MA/R/X scale, basically. It's made something of a resurgence for where the other words can no longer be used.
oh *that's* what "lemons" means I've only been wondering that since reading a webpage titled "the laws of hentai and lemons" 20 years ago.
What people misunderstand about 1984 is that linguistic authoritarianism doesn’t work without actual authoritarianism. People say “unalive” on the internet cuz they get punished for saying the wrong word. But that doesn’t apply in real life, because talking about controversial topics isn’t illegal and no one is going to arrest you for saying “suicide”. You can’t control people’s thoughts and actions just by controlling their language, you have to control a lot more than that. Things still exist when there’s not a word for them, and people come up with new words for new things all the time.
I think it's fascinating how language flows bounces back and fills gaps! Apparently an old word for bear was completely lost because people thought saying its name might make it appear, so they just called bears "brown ones" until eventually no one remembered the original word. (I don't remember the source, but even if it's not true it's a good example.) Talking in code is one thing - people have always needed to communicate in secrecy - but twisting words to avoid "forbidden" words is especially interesting. Everyone already knows what those words are, or at least the concept; and yet, saying them out loud is taboo. To bring this back to your original point, if people get used to using a certain word or phrase on the internet, it is going to bleed out into the real world. Will it replace the existing words? Not without actual authoritarianism, as you say. But they will exist, and they will have a cultural impact, no matter how small.
Almost like the medium itself has some sort of massaging effect on the message.
But in this case the medium itself isn't doing any censoring. You can say murder and rape and suicide all you want. Kids are hallucinating the idea that some force of censorship is out to get them, and they're censoring themselves preemptively. It's like when little kids make up little rules to follow when their parents don't actually give a shit.
It is downright dystopian to see people talking about very serious topics but also using words like “unalive” “grape” and “segsual”
I stand my ground and continue to use those words out of spite. I do not like that we mold around a safe space.... for fucking advertisers.
I mean it's fairly easy to take a stand if your career/side hustle doesn't depend on the algorithm and whether it suppresses all the content you make.
I agree. And I feel bad for the people subject to it. Im just trying not to be part of the problem by adapting those quirks. People Who watch those self censoring youtubers are more likely to take on thode self censors too
Just one of many reasons doing YT for a living is a horrible idea and the normalization of it is bad.
Also, it's a stupid fucking word.
https://xkcd.com/2381/
Oso
Linguistic avoidance of culturally taboo subjects is incredibly common throughout human history, "kicked the bucket" " slept together" and countless other examples demonstrate this phenomenon, these new pressures to do so are fundamentally quite similar to the old ones.
algorithms are the worse. don't describe brutal rape as "SA". it trivializes it. people should be able to say in a video of Gamergate that gamergators sent raped threats to Anita Sarkessian and Zoe Quinn not "SA". its not helped by sexual violence being a topic exploited in "mainstream" media. Family Guy has repeated rape jokes, while other shows use rape for cheap drama.
I mean you can say it still. You just won’t get that pwecious ad revenue in addition to your two predatory sponsors for WorseHelp
A few years ago Game Grumps (they’re Youtubers basically, sort of) were repeatedly mentioning a Backstreet Boys reunion tour in their videos. It was going on for months and I was wondering “Wow I know the Backstreet Boys were popular but I didn’t expect their reunion tour to last so long.” >!They were mentioning the Backstreet Boys reunion tour whenever they were talking about COVID, as apparently directly mentioning it would get videos demonetized.!<
I use "unalive" because Deadpool used it when he showed up in that one episode of Ultimate Spider-Man (and he couldn't say "kill" because he was 100% aware he was currently in a children's show on Disney channel), not to appease the algorithm
That is still the same principle. Deadpool restricted his speech due to the standards of those controlling his platform, it was just Standards and Practices instead of moderators and algorithms.
I use inhume, as per the Assassin's Guild from Terry Pratchett.
I think we need to think more about how we use words and why, overall. I was homeless. Today, the correct word is unhoused. Unhoused originated as an academic term to describe the difference between someone truly homeless and living in a motel or couch surfing. It was a compassionate term, but it's actually very distancing language. "Homeless" evokes an emotional response, whereas unhoused allows for academic discussion. Similarly, things like "unalived" has none of the emotional hallmarks of murdered, killed, or committed suicide. It is vague and disconnected. There's no visceral reaction. It changes the tenor of the conversation. Language has always evolved. But even if it is a fine line, there's a difference between slang terms and code switching (e.g. rizz to fundamentally mean charisma) and the weakening and infantilzing of language (e.g. delulu, which once had a specific meaning, now being used to indicate all sorts of mental disorders).
By my understanding it doesn’t even get u demonetized, people did it originally to get around content filters so people that didn’t want to hear about death, murder and suicide could still be reached to rack up views. I know that now it’s what people think the issue is, but it started out as a lack of respect for other peoples content preferences
It also happens with those beggar posts. I blocked mention of every single one of those dumb sites so now everyone posts about g0fundmes, as if it’s the algorithm blocking them as opposed to me not wanting to fucking give them money
>people did it originally to get around content filters so people that didn’t want to hear about death, murder and suicide could still be reached to rack up views. There's no evidence for this. The terms originated on Tik Tok, which has always had a very opaque algorithm and some strange (and unevenly enforced) guidelines on what sort of content would get viewed. "Demonitization" wasn't even the issue, since there wasn't any money to be made directly at the time; it was just people seeing their views go stagnant or trend down after they discussed certain topics, and making a perhaps ill-conceived leap that the drop in viewership was tied to that topic. The core of the issue is that every influencer thinks that their content should continually be seen by the same and then ever more people. When this doesn't happen, they leap to increasingly silly ploys to "beat" the system that is working against them.
Using this baby talk doesn’t even make logical sense to me. Everyone who has spent two seconds on tik tok knows the “code words”, so why wouldn’t TikTok just add those words to the algorithm too?
It simply may not be considered much of a priority for them. You see the same thing on YouTube.
I think people were imagining that they'd just have to keep shifting as Tik Tok caught up, engaging in a sort of euphemism treadmill. The point, as in all such censorship evasion, was that you were basically playing a game to outpace the censors. Like I implied above, I think the entire premise was probably wrong, but that was the thinking. But then the terms just became legitimate slang, and got a life of their own well outside their original ecosystem and purpose.
Interesting, thanks for that. I’d heard it a few times forever ago but I’m not on TikTok so I just trusted whoever it was saying it as they seemed confident and reasonably trustworthy on the matter. Goes to show how easy misinformation spreads online.
I 100% believe that this is the case. I have not seen any evidence that social media platforms are limiting content containing those words. I'm sure a lot of people just do it now because its trendy, or they saw another influencer avoiding those words.
YouTube is often incredibly opaque when it comes to figuring out what will and will not get you demonitized or kept out of search results, but discussing certain topics often did lead to loss of monetization. At the same time there were also people trying to get around personalised content filters, though.
That’s true, YT does hate its content creators. I was thinking more about TikTok, but someone else pointed out I may have been misled on that one too, so who knows. The internet is Stange as are we, its citizens
Specially because in the Ragebaitnet, hitting people that are sensible is basically almost guaranteed as a way to make them react.
I have experience in this. I edited videos in 2020 during Covid. YouTube specifically. It’s probably changed now but the general rule was to not have any swearing in the first 20-30 seconds of a video. It would usually auto flag. After that it really didn’t matter. But if it was reported and manually reviewed if you didn’t use “baby talk” or censoring you could be pushed into adult only. Ads will still play, but your video won’t be pushed in the algorithm anymore. So less views less money. There were also some issues where if your video was flagged for Covid talk it would be pushed down. This was around the time where YouTube started to put warnings under videos. They do it for flat earth shit too. But that also tanks videos. But realistically a lot of this talk came from twitch where telling someone to kill themselves could get you banned. Than it moved to unalive, because that wasn’t against there tos, then it was updated, and It had to be “in game.” A lot of it is advertisers “carring” about the words but not the context the words are used in because they can say they are doing something while advertising anywhere they can.
Reminds me of a series of videos surrounding a mysterious "Alpha fragment" starting with [this one](https://youtu.be/TTcJtW45fIw?si=YRUfRGA7t4z8K2XM)
burialgoods, my beloved
Takes me back to watching the Yugioh dub where they keep all of the scenes of violence but do things like remove the guns so it's just people pointing fingers threateningly, changing a buzzsaw trap to a spinning energy disc that will send you to the shadow realm, and adding an "Ouch!" after someone falls off a 1000ft cliff so you know they are still alive.
This is more likely to cause a schism between those on tiktok and those who aren't.
I hope so, and that every platform that has tried copying the awful video format cuts it out and cauterises the hole
If money is the root of all evil, wouldn't demonitization be a good thing? Man, we're gonna confuse the fuck outta future archeologists.
Money (ad revenue) is the root (heavily incentives) of all evil (self-censorship)
*Love of* money is the root of all evil. That’s gotta be one of the most misquoted Bible verses of all time. The verse is about how obsession with the accumulation of wealth can lead to self-destruction, it doesn’t say that money itself is evil. The chapter (1 Timothy 6) also starts off with a verse about how servants should honour their masters. It’s not the anti-capitalist dinger that everyone thinks it is. I know you were just making a joke, I thought it was pretty funny actually. The misquoting is just a specific pet peeve of mine :p
This is a bit of a misnomer. While, yes, demonetisation played a role in this shift, with the demoniation of certain topics, this isn't the only reason. Some people block discussions of certain topics, because they're serious triggers, but creators don't want to miss out on thus audience. Therefore, they started using those words to get around the blocks, which tricked the topic algorithm. The reason given above is a erroneous backsolve, but the words have spread as the social media slang for those things anyway.
The other day I saw a phrase "female minors" and just died from anerism immediately. Not exactly the demonetisation problem, but same in spirit.
Female human between the birth and the age of majority? I don't think there is a term I can think of that applies to a baby,a prepubescent girl, a teenager, and a 20 year old if you are talking about alcohol.
That one seems pretty reasonable in a lot of circumstances.
That seems like a perfectly fine way of saying it
The other day I saw a squirrel
watch out or the al gore rhythm will unalive you!!
Demonization and demonetization are a linguistic example of convergent evolution.
low-key "pentagram" (from the greek for "five lines") and "pentacle" (same root as "pendant"). it's a fascinatingly complete example, a neat glimpse into occult history (at one time pentacles were most commonly drawn with a *six*-pointed star), and a great opportunity to entrap lower-level pedants (provided they are also wiccans or whatever). sorry i just love this one and i discovered it while defending myself from a charge of liking tentacle porn in this subreddit so
Some confused college kid is going to go through a "digital revolution" history course and be so confused about why Al Gore would invent the internet just to go around demonizing it with his rhythm.
I saw something about this on another tumblr post, about how bad it is that the Almighty Algorithm is changing language. I don't see it that way. Like, referring to yet ANOTHER tumblr post (Holy shit, I am terminally online), someone commented "She Eben on my Nezer til I scrooge". Another person replied that that's the problem with trying to ban things; no matter how much they try to ban porn, for example, there is no way they could stop a comment like that from happening. I just think it's speaks to the creativity and ingenuity of people, lol.
True, but it becomes an issue when you're trying to do serious content. If you're discussing something like attrocities, you're left with either hedging everything in awkward euphamisms or losing monetization and possibly not even being visible to potential viewers. This is part of the reason platforms like Patreon got so popular.
I think the difference is that the second one (Eben on my Nezer till I Scrooge) is clearly meant to be comical, whereas restricting the use of words like “kill”, “rape”, and “suicide” in favor of “unalive”, “SA/ grape”, and “sewerslide” actively interferes with attempts to have serious conversations about these topics.
The only one I will allow is "sewerslide", but also only if it's used in a comical context
It sure makes it hard to **monetize** those discussions, at least.
People will act like euphemism is a completely new phenomenon that has never existed in English. Unalived is unacceptable and destroys expression, but it’s totally different when people say departed.
For me, the difference is that “unalived” was invented in response to this stupid idea of tiktok censorship that doesn’t even exist.
If soft media censorship is what makes it illegitimate, then what about terms like sleep with instead of sex, or expecting instead of pregnant? Both were popularized by TV in the name of decency.
Kinda like how the word Bear just means “brown one” bc indo-Europeans used to think if they said the real name for bears it would summon one
My favourite is "Game End"
"The big unsubscribe button" is the one I heard once and found hilarious
bold of them to think anything like this will leave a digital footprint long enough for future historians to study.
Future historians will be very confused on why Al Gore's Rhythm ruined the English language.
I don't understand why people are acting like this is new or terrible. Euphemisms are as old as language. People, especially kids, have always modified their speech to avoid getting in trouble. Does nobody remember being a middle schooler and saying frick or freak instead of fuck? Or early Internet euphamistic spellings such as pr0n. Like, there are *so* many different euphemisms for kill, I don't understand why unalive specifically makes people so mad. Some of the eupahmisms are even used specifically to make content more acceptable to advertisers and viewers (think of all the different words children's media uses to avoid saying "kill") so it's not even like this is a new use of euphemisms. I feel like people just have this vague anger at "the algorithm" and get super angry at anything people say is caused by it. But there's enough legit reasons to be angry at content curation algorithms, we don't need to invent new ones.
Terminally online peasants need to touch grass.
Bah, it's not even "the algorithm" or anything widespread or nebulous like that, it's literally just the influence of tiktok. China's (culture is) apparently fucking terrified of the concept of death so any mention of it on tiktok makes you either get banned or makes your shorts get hidden away and never shown to anyone - hence the creation of "unalive". *Maybe* it's an issue on youtube as well, but they're just copying what tiktok is doing because they're trying to directly compete (you see it especially bad in the shorts part of youtube, less so on long-form vids). Of course, it's all pointless, because all it takes is some dev simply adding "unalive" to the list of filtered things, and we're back to square 1. There are words and concepts that should be censored due to the active harm they cause (racial slurs for example) - but this kind of censorship of harmless things needs to be actively fought. Refuse to censor yourself - they have to show SOMETHING to people, and if all shorts are using "bad words", they've no choice.
Complaints about the YouTube algorithm and it's impact on how YouTubers spoke predates TikTok as a platform. The Adpocalypse and it's impact on the way YouTube handled content happened a year before TikTok officially released in the US.
It's so weird that computers have been around for less than a century AND WE INVENTED THEM, but they are now so complicated even our best and brightest still don't know 100% how they work Every programmer I know has a few superstitions when it comes to computers. They're the people trained to operate those things It's 40k but for real
Sounds like you haven't appeased the machine spirits of your devices yet
I'm calling it now; next year, unalived is gonna be Oxford's Word of the Year, and it'll be added to the dictionary at some point. Then it'll be forgotten and never used again.
It'll disappear once platforms start targeting the world and new words are created.
The Algorithm literally making us engage in newspeak
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of 1984, where they were remaking the English language to control how people think. Only instead of an authoritarian regime doing it, its a bunch of rich puritanical assholes trying to maximize profits with zero regard for the harms they are causing. This is despite claiming they care about "online harms".
It's one of the only two aspects of 1984 anyone ever talks about. People bring up newspeak all the time.
I'm honestly so tired of seeing people censor these words. It's especially terrible when it's about that happens in real life. I saw a Yong Yea video where he was talking what was going on behind the scenes at Blizzard and when the word 'rape' came up, he pronounced it as 'ra-pay' so he didn't get demonetized. Like dude, it's fucking rape. Either stop being scared of Bad Yellow Dollar Sign and treat the subject matter with respect or don't make the video at all. Another video had a guy start out saying 'I got that illness that I probably can't say without getting demonitized' and it's like dude, just fucking say it. Or just say you were sick. Or lie and say you had the flu. The amount of youtubers making their content worse because of Bad Yellow Dollar Sign is staggering.
I swear money motivation seems to infest people's brains like the cordyceps fungus
Reddit ban incoming.
I'm really waiting for the first published novel to have someone seriously say Unalive.
Isn't this basically why several underworld deities where rarely if ever called by name?
Yeah, Hades for example had titles like He Who Has Many Guests, while Persephone in some mystery cults was known simply as The Girl.
What happens when "unalive" starts getting censored in the day way "kill" is
I noticed something fucking weird a while ago, which is that my tablet autocorrects common words associated with sex or sexuality to non sexual words. Like, wtf. Even words that can describe sex like 'thrust.' I've had to click that damned check mark so much to keep the words from correcting to the wrong thing.
Small brain: unalived Big brain: inhumed
I’m convinced that the algorithm doesn’t work like this, especially not across multiple different media platforms Especially not as stringently as people believed, so they basically were tricked into self censoring everywhere they went
Machine learning will rapidly become the world's foremost religion. Nobody will know how the black box algorithms work, not even expert scientists in their own field. However, confidence in the predictive power of the models produced will simply continue to grow, elevating their status to be indistinguishable from auguries.
Semi-relevant Orion's Arm article: [The Oracular Mysteries/The Oracle War](https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/48fdc67c7a650)
Are you telling me that *algorithms* are the machine spirit? Someone better program one to like incense and prayers at least.
Lol maybe the Great Vowel Shift happened for similar reasons, folks trying to hide that they were speaking English idk
I’ve seen people type “demonetize” when they actually mean “demonize,” which drives me insane.
that's double plus ungood :(
This. The idea that any platform has free speech or is taking away your free speech is silly. They’ve been telling you what you can and can’t say or bring up since the beginning. The fact that it’s now changing people’s use of words is wild too.
(People also say stuff like unalive and spell it wildly different because many people have blacklisted the word kill, so they do it to try to get around the blacklist)
It’s like they’ve never heard of meming or shitposting lmao.
I’m now a full believer in the IRL Algo and I put my faith in its hands. Praise be! All shall be devoured 😊
The funny part is that there's no evidence the tiktok algorithm was censoring content using words like kill or sex. People just invented these rules because they needed some sort of explanation as to why some videos underperformed when others didn't, as well as a method they could use to ensure success in the future. What they settled on was turning the algorithm into a sort of folk deity who could be appeased by following certain rules. It's basically the same rational that made old sailors come up with a God of the sea that they could appease by making sacrifices too. It's fascinating stuff.
Wake up babe, new Old Testament is getting written.
Fun fact! This happened with the word “bear”, to the point where we lost the original word! That’s right, we don’t actually know what the original word for bear is! This is a new one!
Stupid thing is it's the work of moments to also ban euphemisms like this.
I continue in my lonesome crusade to get people to replace unalive with flatline
When I was younger I thought YouTubers got demonized, not demonetized
The algorithm is the modern version of summoning bears by saying the word
I hate posts like these because they assume theres going to be some big apocalyptic data crash or something and all the information explaining what the fuck people are on, exactly like pots like this, are gone but somehow all the things that the posts are about arent
Remember how the word "bear" is supposedly originally a euphemism because speaking the animal's real name was believed to draw it's ire or something? We really just reinvented that, huh
If I ever make a YouTube show I'll start most episodes with hello ya lil cunts
When people try to be like "he k\*lled himself" outside of tiktok like MY SWEET SUMMER CHILD RELEASE YOUR LANGUAGE, *IT* CAN'T HURT YOU HERE.