We are going to kill "unalive"(anildash.com) |
We are going to kill "unalive"(anildash.com) |
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.
I found solace on the offline world though, going back to being a "local", participating in activities where the internet is far away. It's a cliché but being present in the real world is actually what solved my mourning of what the internet was.
People on the internet are tiring because how they interact is shaped to turn everything into a binary, the platforms where people spout their opinions don't foster any kind of actual human communication, it's just a farce of it with a never-ending shit-flinging-fest. If that's what you incentivise for you will only get the worst of people's outbursts.
If your brain hasn't been completely rotted by internet discourse then you will find that having hard conversations in the real world is still possible, that disagreeing while being curious and courteous about someone else's worldview is possible. It doesn't happen when people are so far down the internet rabbit hole that their real life persona is just a shadow of what their internet persona is, otherwise you will find that people offline can be much more reasonable, that you can have a discussion without resorting to shit-flinging from the binary "you are transgressive vs we are in-agreement".
You should try, it's very refreshing to realise that the real world is still not the internet, as much as social media companies are trying to make it.
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.
That said, the existence of taboos are a social universal. Some things are better discussed in some contexts than others, more intimately or more publicly etc. However, the 20th century zeitgeist has decided that subverting all taboos will be liberating, the personal should be political and vice versa, everything should stripped of context and dusty old rules, so now that we have the tech, let's just have short videos floating out there and sliding into people's feeds, talking about the heaviest subjects etc.
But then if tiktok suddenly pushed suicide content, and then someone actually committed suicide, and the two could be juxtaposed into a story, it would be a big PR issue. There is a reason companies don't want to go near these topics. Because then they have to police it by content valence. You can talk about heavy topic X from such and such angles, but you must list such and such caveats but also you are free to express your experiences with your own unique voice, lest those get "erased" or whatnot. We will need superintelligent AI to be able to satisfy all the contradictory expectations. Until then, someone will always grumble.
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 came up with "unalived" to get around censorship built by idiots who think they can trivially police language like this, now unalive is being used viciously by unkind people
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.
> 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...
Imagine what a shitty place to be being a teen, writing or speaking out, and having 5 views and 0 likes.
Just because they are made consenting accomplices in the system doesn't mean they are not victims.
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.
Algospeak / Slang Replacement
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/algospeak-slang-replacement
2015 "unalive" usage on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563729
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.
"Commit suicide" in TikTok NewSpeak isn't a single word. It's still two: "unalived themselves". "Unalive" means "kill".
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 no no, it's very wrong, you are doing it wrong. Agree with the general sentiment though.
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.
One material difference I can think of is that what is being filtered here is not necessarily a side effect, it's not like the platform wants to ban just rape threats and end up banning discussion about rape cases and rape experiences, it might be that the platforms simply benefit from discouraging all talk about negative experiences and they might benefit from associating their brand only with positive experiences which sell more ads and avoid associating brands with negative experiences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY
The top comment, as I opened the link:
> He would have hated the word "unalive".
Lowering PAGERANK of pages that contained those words (there was a secret naughty word list(fun fact that word list was initially copied from the tv censor word list)). So websites removed those words for seo.
And that’s how we got here.
Bonus fun fact: everything google penalised has been removed. Including my favorite of huge curated directory lists of links. If you had more links on your page it “bled” more pagerank which reduced your sites score. So sites stopped linking to each other so much. “Hacks” like stumbleupon appeared but faded. That’s why you can’t find cool websites anymore and you just rotate the same 5 mind numbing boring sites over and over.
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.
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:
"Le dollar beans" for "lesbians" via "le$bians". I'd laugh if it wasn't all so fucking sad and stupid.
It's also not the first generation to rotate language superficially until the new term has the same connotations of the old term, because the meaning has not changed.
And as for the cause of that language shift, I always understood that it was out of a cabalistic following of superstitions that may be correlated to greater reach due to a better marketability with advertisers, so the teenagers appease the algorithm because they understand how the system works.
Sometimes using the new term means subscribing to a new set of rules around the term, saying heck instead of hell or gosh means acknowledging that those are sacred words, using black instead of pejorative alternatives implies being somewhat up to speed with the history and sensitivity around the subject.
And in this case, it's a mix of subversivion and rule following, that kids use euphemisms to talk about a rape case, on the one hand they acknowledge that talking about such subjects online requires care and may be subject to censoring, on the other, they evade an automated filter and talk about it anyway.
That said, I recall the author being a sort of Spolsky successor from StackOverflow, but what are they up to now in the context of this article? Is he working on some sort of next gen social media? Or is it just advisory stuff.
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.
The response is simple
[7-part plot to convince social media that authenticity matters more than money]
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.
- 4chan
- Kiwi Farms
- Maybe modern Twitter? (I don't believe this, but that's the current narrative anyway)
Similarly, you have to be very off-putting to the mainstream to prevent the gentrification of such a censorship-resistant platform. It's like a costly signal. That's precisely why you feel they are off-putting. It works as intended and keeps out people who'd try to turn it into the way everything else is. Like when rich hip college kids gentrify an area and turn it into a sanitized thing that is the same as everywhere else. The offensiveness is a protective barrier.
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.
Advertising is surely a big part of this situation.
I'm not a "content creator" but as I understand it, nobody is afraid they will get banned from these platforms for using these trigger words, they avoid using the words because they are afraid their content will be demonetized to delink it from advertisements.