I'm actually just tired of the internet as a whole, which is disheartening after it being the cornerstone of my career for the last several decades.
Corporate censorship has me tired. Government censorship has me tired. Self censorship has me tired. The way we all hate each other has me tired. The way we all hate the situation and yet do nothing has me tired. Knowing that even doing something will change nothing has me tired.
You and me both. I'm not even sure I have the energy to eat the rich anymore, should the opportunity present itself, nor can I get worked up over the fact that this means they probably won. It's all so fucking stupid.
It used to be that western governments and powerful people based in the west had a reason to promote our society as somehow good. That reason was that they were terrified the masses would turn to communism. This is obviously not to say Marxist-Leninism is something to aspire to, but it certainly created an incentive. Now that threat has been defeated, our own powerful people are free to tighten the screws without fear of an organised response.
I agree with the overall point, but I think a large fraction of the usage of these terms is about in-group signaling rather than conscious efforts to appease the algorithm.
What I mean is that a few people did figure out that appeasing the algorithm generates more views, and these are the people that get many followers. The followers themselves probably don't think that deeply about it; they just want to be like the accounts they follow (because they think everyone else in their social circles want to), and copy their use of language.
It's probably similar to how I started using semicolons more after reading Mary Shelley, except more gross.
>> I’ve heard people say, out loud, “he unalived himself”, in reference to someone dying by suicide.
I also grew up in the previous century and it is equally strange to hear ‘dying by suicide’ when it used to be more common to say ‘committed suicide’ or just ‘killed himself/herself’. The author does a reasonable job of explaining why people might use ‘unalive’ and why he thinks that is a bad idea, but what was the reason a person started ‘dying by suicide’ instead of ‘killing himself/hersself/themselves’?
People without power or influence use language creatively to evade censorship, typically as lowly users of social media like reddit, etc.. Content creators, influencers, etc. then pick up that new language and use it, but the typical Tiktok influencer originates nothing. They merely reflect.
The nameless people who actually set language trends can go back to using censored words, but they will simply be banned, shadow banned, etc.. They can try to appeal to the moderators, but they will be ignored. Their fellow users probably won't even notice they're gone. They might just make a new account and start posting again. Or... they might just fall silent.
The real solution isn't to play a peg in the game of censorship whack-a-mole. It's to build and switch to social media platforms that are more open in their moderation and resistant to censorship. American social media is abominable and getting worse. There's a popular desire to move to something better, but the alternatives aren't there. When you're doing being whacked on the head, go build those alternatives.
Fediverse in general, though the Masto side seems rather fond of censorship themselves. I recommend finding a small Pleroma/Akkoma instance or hosting your own. Also as a tip you can use an instance's search without an account to check if they block posts from certain other instances before you sign up.
The problem is most people (who may say they want censorship-free social media) do not really want it to be censorship-free. They want it to be censorship-free for the opinions and views they hold, not for those they oppose.
I think X arguably comes closest, and at least it costs bots money to post with a checkmark (unlike Reddit, which is a bot free-for-all - since its very origins actually). Plus, the feed & community notes algorithms are actually open source (whether or not that's also the deployed version, I can only speculate).
Mastodon is at least moderately censorship resistant, in the sense that you can stand up an instance where you can say what you want. There's no particular requirement anyone else will listen to you, of course (objectionable speech tends to cause other servers to defederate from your instance), but that's federation working as intended.
> There's a popular desire to move to something better
I have to put a big "citation needed" on. The average person really does not care about any of this, they'll happily write "seggs" and not think any deeper about why they are writing it.
Personally my own annoyance with social media really has not much to do with censorship, but more to do with engagement farming. That problem is much less straightforward to fix, though I can pretty clearly see that X's "pay for engagement" incentive structure makes things demonstrably worse than on other places, where "link in bio" is a pretty reliable indicator of an engagement farmer.
For what it's worth, the Prequel Memes subreddit has a similar take [1] on the issue:
> New rule, no algo-speak or self-censoring. This isn't tik tok and the target audience here does not have a median age of 11. You can say murder on the subreddit about the movies where little kids are slaughtered.
You're right that it's in-group signaling, but that's actually why it's going to basically disappear within a few years. This sort of youth slang rotates out regularly.
A lot of it has to do with religious fundamentalism too, though. There are religious groups whose members believe they are participating in sin if they read words describing that sin.
Alas, this is not an easy problem to just hand wave away as youth slang. There will always be an older person policing youth speech. That is the nature of religion, governments and social policy as a whole - to ensure the youthful generations don't upset the bucket in which the old sit.
For as long as the Internet has been online there have been curmudgeons willfully applying their personal doctrine to strangers.
I don’t think the algorithm even does care, I think it’s just a mass-hallucination.
I’ve seen these kinds of beliefs appear in organisations too. People will start doing ridiculous things just because the people around them are doing it, until suddenly entire teams are behaving completely wrong and not following proper procedure.
I think the algorithm doesn't care about violence but for sex education I'm not as sure. It would make sense for social media to err on the side of caution against pornographic content, leading to censorship of sex education as well. Which is very unfortunate of course. But it's all about the advertisers and credit card companies in the end.
Remember the online commentary during covid... So many terms you couldn't use. And then commentators coming up with some alternative to anyway bypass the filtering. In the end whole thing is pointless. If someone wants to say something they will figure out way to bypass filters.
Well, maybe with AI the net can get wide enough to catch everything. Might be lot of bycatch but I think platforms are willing to accept that.
No comment on the central message, but I actually like "unalive" as a word: it feels vaguely Old English. "Commit suicide" always felt a little stilted as a two word phrase.
Worth a read, it makes some really good points.
But there's nothing new under the sun - I did laugh and felt old at reading "This sort of attack on people’s expression started on platforms like TikTok"... the author wasn't even conceived when Compuserve/AOL users had to avoid using "breast cancer" and "scunthorpe".
> the author wasn't even conceived when Compuserve/AOL users had to avoid using "breast cancer" and "scunthorpe".
Anil Dash is 51, two years younger than me but I'm old af.
He has written extensively of his time using AOL.
IMO there's a substantive difference between avoiding overzealous and clumsy early profanity filters, and the "unalive" phenomenon where people are being programmed to not use entirely non-profane words like "suicide" on many platforms.
Nobody is getting "muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms"!
They are getting muted or silenced by busybodies who try to control language, and are either in a position to install these algorithms, or are part of pressure mobs that aim to influence the former.
It's not even busybodies in that sense. It is mostly advertisers mandating that their ads not be placed next to anything that could be construed as a reputation risk.
This shit is infecting media everywhere. One of my guilty voyeuristic pleasures is watching the reality TV series Border Security, where you get to watch ingenious smuggling attempts notionally foiled by clever Australian border cops, although mostly just by stupid smugglers too incompetent to come up with a remotely plausible cover story for why they've just flown from Colombia to Melbourne for three days, don't know anybody, have no idea what they're going to do, and have a travel budget of $3.50 and a Taco Bell coupon.
As you'd expect, drugs feature a lot, only they've had to resort to using "dr*gs", "co****e" and "na*****s" (yup, 5 asterisks!) in titles/captions, splicing the naughty words out of the sound tracks, and even blurring words on the screens of drug screening devices so as not to offend The Algorithm. Typical example preformatted for Tiktok:
It also seems so pointless, as any cheap-ish LLM will probably be able to catch on to any new algospeak within days. Remember back in the GPT-3.5 days, when it could already turn any movie premise into three-four emoji?
"Le dollar beans" for "lesbians" via "le$bians". I'd laugh if it wasn't all so fucking sad and stupid.
What is very frustrating is that there is a lot of preemptive compliance. The vast majority of the time there is absolutely no consequence in saying “fuck” or “kill”. Yet we see ridiculous euphemisms and asterisks everywhere. It is maddening to see IRL people re-acting 1984 without realising it.
I guess I'm old, I had no idea what "unalive" meant. I mean, I, of course, realised it meant killing, but I assumed it was ironic and part of youth culture similar to things like "1337". I had no idea it was part of self-censorship.
What a fucking awful hellscape you guys have built for your children.
> If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms
Boo fucking hoo. I was with you right up until this point. The thing is, for Gen Z words and meanings do not matter any more.
Words have clearly defined (legal) meanings and no, not everything that Gen Z deems to be a genocide is a genocide or has any chance in hell to be labeled one in the future.
Corporate censorship has me tired. Government censorship has me tired. Self censorship has me tired. The way we all hate each other has me tired. The way we all hate the situation and yet do nothing has me tired. Knowing that even doing something will change nothing has me tired.
What I mean is that a few people did figure out that appeasing the algorithm generates more views, and these are the people that get many followers. The followers themselves probably don't think that deeply about it; they just want to be like the accounts they follow (because they think everyone else in their social circles want to), and copy their use of language.
It's probably similar to how I started using semicolons more after reading Mary Shelley, except more gross.
I also grew up in the previous century and it is equally strange to hear ‘dying by suicide’ when it used to be more common to say ‘committed suicide’ or just ‘killed himself/herself’. The author does a reasonable job of explaining why people might use ‘unalive’ and why he thinks that is a bad idea, but what was the reason a person started ‘dying by suicide’ instead of ‘killing himself/hersself/themselves’?
The nameless people who actually set language trends can go back to using censored words, but they will simply be banned, shadow banned, etc.. They can try to appeal to the moderators, but they will be ignored. Their fellow users probably won't even notice they're gone. They might just make a new account and start posting again. Or... they might just fall silent.
The real solution isn't to play a peg in the game of censorship whack-a-mole. It's to build and switch to social media platforms that are more open in their moderation and resistant to censorship. American social media is abominable and getting worse. There's a popular desire to move to something better, but the alternatives aren't there. When you're doing being whacked on the head, go build those alternatives.
- 4chan
- Kiwi Farms
- Maybe modern Twitter? (I don't believe this, but that's the current narrative anyway)
I think X arguably comes closest, and at least it costs bots money to post with a checkmark (unlike Reddit, which is a bot free-for-all - since its very origins actually). Plus, the feed & community notes algorithms are actually open source (whether or not that's also the deployed version, I can only speculate).
> There's a popular desire to move to something better
I have to put a big "citation needed" on. The average person really does not care about any of this, they'll happily write "seggs" and not think any deeper about why they are writing it.
Personally my own annoyance with social media really has not much to do with censorship, but more to do with engagement farming. That problem is much less straightforward to fix, though I can pretty clearly see that X's "pay for engagement" incentive structure makes things demonstrably worse than on other places, where "link in bio" is a pretty reliable indicator of an engagement farmer.
> New rule, no algo-speak or self-censoring. This isn't tik tok and the target audience here does not have a median age of 11. You can say murder on the subreddit about the movies where little kids are slaughtered.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PrequelMemes/comments/1p2t06d/new_r...
Alas, this is not an easy problem to just hand wave away as youth slang. There will always be an older person policing youth speech. That is the nature of religion, governments and social policy as a whole - to ensure the youthful generations don't upset the bucket in which the old sit.
For as long as the Internet has been online there have been curmudgeons willfully applying their personal doctrine to strangers.
I’ve seen these kinds of beliefs appear in organisations too. People will start doing ridiculous things just because the people around them are doing it, until suddenly entire teams are behaving completely wrong and not following proper procedure.
Well, maybe with AI the net can get wide enough to catch everything. Might be lot of bycatch but I think platforms are willing to accept that.
"Commit suicide" in TikTok NewSpeak isn't a single word. It's still two: "unalived themselves". "Unalive" means "kill".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
The top comment, as I opened the link:
> He would have hated the word "unalive".
Anil Dash is 51, two years younger than me but I'm old af.
He has written extensively of his time using AOL.
IMO there's a substantive difference between avoiding overzealous and clumsy early profanity filters, and the "unalive" phenomenon where people are being programmed to not use entirely non-profane words like "suicide" on many platforms.
All that said, I agree, it is worth a read.
They are getting muted or silenced by busybodies who try to control language, and are either in a position to install these algorithms, or are part of pressure mobs that aim to influence the former.
Lowering rank of pages that contained those words. So websites removed those words for seo. And that’s how we got here.
As you'd expect, drugs feature a lot, only they've had to resort to using "dr*gs", "co****e" and "na*****s" (yup, 5 asterisks!) in titles/captions, splicing the naughty words out of the sound tracks, and even blurring words on the screens of drug screening devices so as not to offend The Algorithm. Typical example preformatted for Tiktok:
https://youtube.com/shorts/gbPiRqpEMKk?si=6VH9qO-T5_4wbnsz
"Le dollar beans" for "lesbians" via "le$bians". I'd laugh if it wasn't all so fucking sad and stupid.
Coca Cola doesn't want ads next/before/during/after social media posts talking about people killing themselves.
But people are problem solving machines so we end up here.
How about we just GTFO off these platforms. Ironically that's something that might actually make the difference.
What a fucking awful hellscape you guys have built for your children.
Boo fucking hoo. I was with you right up until this point. The thing is, for Gen Z words and meanings do not matter any more.
Words have clearly defined (legal) meanings and no, not everything that Gen Z deems to be a genocide is a genocide or has any chance in hell to be labeled one in the future.