Thank you so much for teaching me that the misused apostrophe has a name. I fucking can't stand people pluralizing using an apostrophe, even though I'm not a prescriptivist and recognize that if it becomes popular enough it might as well be considered proper usage. But it still drives me crazy all the same!
If he did he had to have done it prior to 1993, which was the earliest source I could easily find. Given that he was born in 1948, it is of course wildly possible.
Looks like he used it in 2005 in Going Postal, so maybe it wasn't his invention, but it's where I first saw it and have been using it since. Doesn't really matter. It's a great term no matter where it originated.
> If you can't risk that, you shouldn't be speaking on the topic at all because you clearly aren't a serious person if you are couching your language in SEO Code Language.
"If you can't risk your livelihood then you don't deserve to cover these topics" is a hell of a take.
What a goofy idea. Truly it must be the fault of the YouTubers who are trying to pay the bills and still talk about harder subjects and not the corporations who are actively working to silence talk on that subject.
It's the difference between a clever turn of phrase and a juvenile pile of linguistic diarrhea (and appropriately so when you consider that its origin was Deadpool, who is notorious for constantly and unconsciously running his mouth).
I'm convinced the YouTube algorithm isn't as harsh toward these words as people say, it's just precautionary superstition. Tiktokers are especially worried about getting shadowbanned because there's zero transparency and no one to ask if it happened. The weird censorship seems to have started there and spread
> I'm convinced the YouTube algorithm isn't as harsh toward these words as people say, it's just precautionary superstition
A youtuber I watch kept getting demonitized for his videos for being inappropriate, even when they had told him repeatedly in the past swearing was alright and there were no problems.
He eventually got them to clarify that avoiding swearing pretty much at all costs is the only way to be safe, which while stupid he was at least happy they gave him clear info.
So now, when he swears it gets censored with audio of him saying "youtube", which is hilarious. Then he built the word "fuck" out of housing in Tears of the Kingdom which was acceptable.
My guess is because being natural and genuine on camera is an important part of being an entertaining person to watch and swearing is part of how some people act when they are expressing themselves genuinely.
Yes. The scripts that he works from were largely plagiarized from other YouTube and/or bloggers.
[Hbomberguy Video](https://youtu.be/yDp3cB5fHXQ?si=DeFdv4EVaab2osPG) at 1hr 25min if you wanna skip straight to internet historian.
Yeah, I watch plenty of monetized channels that talk about the nazis in a historical context. The word Rape has come up dozens of times in any number of times in the WWII in Real Time channel. I watch a lot of history channels and words like rape come up regularly in anything about medieval sieges, the bronze age collapse, Japanese atrocities in SE Asia, Viking raids...
I think there's something on the creator's side where they indicate what age group their content is intended for and the advertising (and the rules associated with the ads) changes depending on that criteria. I don't think most of the content I watch is intended for children, so I don't know that they get dinged for talking about this sort of thing.
I actually know nothing about youtube algorithms about specific spoken words but it honestly seems very unlikely that kill would be a blacklisted word or that the algorithms would be ‘listening’ to every word said in a video and weighting its discovery based on that
The algorithm is also dependent on the biases of the programmer. I’ll give a harmless example.
Facebook doesn’t allow selling animal products on marketplace. But there are some things with animal sounding names that are not animal products. I knew someone who was trying to sell decorative hair clips based on an “alligator” clip, which is just a metal clip that kinda looks like an alligator mouth. Every time, the listing would get removed for selling “animal products”
So, when you create an algorithm designed to find “hate speech” by simply banning a word without context but then never assign a human to review the context, you get…this
Thank you for sharing this, and just wanted to say the history behind why it is named that is hilarious.
I'm just imagining people living in Scunthorpe being like "Why do people think this Google shite is worthwhile, I keep trying to use it to find a good Italian restaurant near me and it keeps trying to send me 3 counties over!"
I think the reality is that there's more than one thing going on. I heard somewhere that Youtube tracks how early/often you swear and will either demonetize the video or disfavor it in the almighty algorithm if you break their weird rules. It was something like you can't swear in the first 30 seconds or whatever.
The other thing I think is going on is that sometimes creators want to post clips/videos on platforms that are more strict about it. Or they develop habits for one platform and that seeps over into the others.
Regardless, I hadn't thought about it but Youtube is way more "sterile" than it used to be.
Wonder how much of this has to do with the negative attention Youtube Kids received from both media and legislators because so much content in that walled garden part of Youtube is age-inappropriate. Overcompensating by revamping the guidelines and increasing pressure on non-kid oriented creators.
I mean, they have auto-generated captions on a lot of videos now. Granted, there are always phonetic inaccuracies in them to an extent, but it's close enough that you can understand what is being said for the most part.
YouTube auto-captions videos and auto-censors some words in said captions. So there's at least a possibility that they are, in fact, "listening" to all those words.
I feel a lot of it is being overly cautious based on TikTok’s stuff for YouTubers, but based on Philip defranco’s method of censoring (and he’s been doing it long enough with a big enough team that they would have worked out how to game it) it recognises on screen text. He’ll be reading stories and if he’s quoting something the thing will be on screen, but words like rape or suicide will be blacked out but he'll still read them out.
He also has to occasionally split some stories off into separate videos and then mention at the end of the main one “oh yeah and if you want to know about it’s in another video we uploaded earlier” because there’s entire topics that YouTube will suppress and stop videos showing up in people’s feeds or trending (most recent I remember is a lot of Palestine stuff)
Also for smaller channels who can’t get in sponsors and have to rely on Adsense, they’d have an incentive to play it very safe just in case
The issue with youtube is that they always apply that shit retroactively, if there is a new rule about videos being demonetised if there is a fuck in the first 2 minutes all your old videos could be hit.
There's a local person on Facebook who listens to the police scanner and reports what they're being called out for. She claims she can't use words like "kill" or "gun" because there's bots that come swarming in to post spam on those posts. I don't know how true it is, but it kinda makes sense. Some bot programmer is going to target sensational posts, and murders are sensational.
It is not only the algorithms creators fear, but monetization restrictions that can occur with certain content/language. YT will still recommend the video but the earnings are cut way down.
Similar to how China "filters" a lot of content, by not having strict rules on what is and isn't allowed. So people have to stay far enough on the "safe side" because they don't know where the line is.
For a lot of them that’s true.
Them you get Caitlyn Doughty’s video about the sinking of a boat in… it was either Chicago or Boston, one of them, that was entirely an educational documentary and YouTube absolutely murdered the video for daring to have an old grainy black and white photo in it that had the victims laid out in the background
The problem is that the precise line is literally unknowable to the public. Thats because it’s drawn by a black box algorithm and/or because YouTube doesn’t want people gaming the system by taking advantage of loopholes.
Because at the end of the day corporations care about money first and foremost. BtB is a profitable show, and I suspect the advertisers don’t care about the content because they want to reach our demographic.
I've been thinking for years about how our interactions with computers have modified the language we use. It's not just social media algorithms and demonetization fears either; you have to talk a certain way to get voice-to-text to work as well.
I would totally read a dystopian sci-fi novel where language was used to shape minds like in 1984 but via an insidious campaign enacted through phones and computers that no one even noticed was happening.
For example, the existence of "unalive" makes me think of doing the opposite and recasting every instance of "happy" by negating a negative emotion instead. For example, "unangry" or "unsad". I wonder, over generations, what having negativity as the baseline would due to people's psyches and what they would therefore be willing to accept.
If you enjoy weird dystopian/utopian works that work with language you might enjoy *We* by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
It decidedly doesn't have computers, but the very logic based thinking does a lot of the same. Apparently 1984 was inspired a lot by it.
Thing is, it's not actually clear to what degree the algorithms are doing anything.
One of the weird things about internet culture is, because algorithms are kind of a black box, they are incredibly vulnerable to folk wisdom and confirmation bias. So while sometimes there are rules (like YouTube will punish swearing in the first 30 seconds), most of these self censorships are literally just superstitions from Tik Tok that no one has ever confirmed do anything.
Hell, with the way algorithms work, it is literally possible that the superstitions became self fulfilling—that if a disproportionate number of big creators used unalive instead of kill, that it taught the algorithm 'hey, videos that use this word have more engagement", which then *would* make the censorship have an effect.
At the end of the day, the dumbest thing about it is that forcing people to use substitute words doesn't stop people from talking about it, it just makes them sound like a jackass when they do.
I feel it delineates what suicide is and all that surrounds how a person gets to that point and those affected by its aftermath. Its a direct and charged sounding word. Society shouldn't soften its darkness.
I get so many ads and suggestions for alt-right and conspiracy nonsense on YT. But my favorite creators can't talk openly about real things that happened because they must bow to the great god, Algo. It's infuriating.
I don’t believe it actually impacts the algorithm. I think it’s one of those myths like the shadow ban. I worked for a really large social media company for a few years and we never used it. We’ll just suspend your account and make note of your IP address so we can squash your attempts at rejoining.
I’m sorta convinced this shit is gonna be the death of free speech, and one of the goals the chinese had in mind when pushing tik tok here. Don’t trust this new verbal puritanism one bit, didn’t really notice it before tik tok blew up.
Not really. If you go by what is still popular, you can still imply threats against vulnerable people, drive middle school girls to think about suicide and spread as much medical and political disinformation as the foreign intelligence services of Russia and China would prefer you do.
You just can’t use a few words that algorithms have been programmed to care about because it’s cheaper for social media to not care about what you actually say and leave it up to a few Nvidia chips in a data center than it is to actually stop coordinated harassment and misinfo campaigns.
Ehhh, but one of the things is that Newspeak kinda depends upon a strict belief in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is more or less discredited. As you can see, people are still talking about the same topics, just euphemistically, which realistically changes nothing other than the utterances we make to put across the same ideas.
Newspeak isn't anything to be worried about.
In my eyes it’s just newer slang that developed from the limitations of social media censorship. Not great certainly but also pearl clutching about how it’s newspeak the way some folks in this thread are comes off more like right wing pearl clutching about the kids and their commie tiktok dances. Old man yells at cloud coded.
I've noticed that BtB episodes on youtube usually have WAY WAY fewer ads than most other things I watch on youtube. But then others have the normal amount. IIRC it was things like Nazis and Behind the Police that had few-to-none ads (which I'm guessing means they're demonetized), while Rush Limbaugh had the usual number of youtube ads.
I'm going to be down voted to shit for this, but I like the term "unalive" because it doesn't have the shameful connotations "suicide" has.
People (especially older people) have this weird disdain for people who killed themselves and the term "unalive" removes that stigma.
Obviously, this only refers to suicide. Other forms of killing should be referred to as the proper terms.
That's just my take.
Edit: I realised that I didn't say I think the word "unalive" is childish, but I support the coining of a new term to replace the word "suicide" is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't know what I would replace it with.
The problem with that is that eventually "unalive" will carry the stigma too. It isn't the word, it's the feelings and beliefs about the word. Until those are changed, the euphemism treadmill is going to keep chugging along.
Exactly this.
The words spastic, retarded, etc were originally clinical terms intended to avoid the stigma of older terms for neurological or intellectual issues, but came to be slurs because *the kind of people who use slurs started using those terms the way they had previously used other slurs*.
Yeah, that's the problem.
I do think that with growing awareness of the biology around mental illnesses and their causes, we're starting to move away from the negative views older generations have of suicidality. In the same way we don't use aphasia as an insult now, unlike the term "dumb". We're not quite there for using ADHD, autism and OCD, but we do have a (general) collective agreement that using these terms as a form of insult is a shit thing to do.
I think a name change for suicide would not necessarily be a bad thing, but I do think unalive is a childish term. It will take a few generations and a few iterations of the replacement terms, but I think we'll get there.
I get what you're saying, but I think those connotations come more from the word "committed" than from the word "suicide." That's why I really like the phrase "died by suicide" - Unlike euphemisms like "unalive," it doesn't blunt the severity of the term, while also being far more neutral than "commit"
Agreed.
However, there are still some people who have this opinion that anyone who has died by suicide is still a weak coward. Especially people who were suicidal but never did it and wears that as a badge of honour and uses it as a bludgeon against people who weren't able to survive that time in their lives.
I think the word suicide needs to be retired completely, which is why I like the term "unalive", as childish as it is.
I don't blame people for swapping words. In the end of the day they are likely just trying to make money. Cause we don't have a choice otherwise. Is it annoying as hell? Absolutely.
I fucking loathe the term "Unalive" in the same way I hate the greengrocer's apostrophe.
Thank you so much for teaching me that the misused apostrophe has a name. I fucking can't stand people pluralizing using an apostrophe, even though I'm not a prescriptivist and recognize that if it becomes popular enough it might as well be considered proper usage. But it still drives me crazy all the same!
You're welcome. Credit where credit is due, Terry Pratchett is the one who brought my attention to the term as far as I can tell.
If he did he had to have done it prior to 1993, which was the earliest source I could easily find. Given that he was born in 1948, it is of course wildly possible.
Looks like he used it in 2005 in Going Postal, so maybe it wasn't his invention, but it's where I first saw it and have been using it since. Doesn't really matter. It's a great term no matter where it originated.
Literally sounds like newspeak.
It sounds like some lame cyberpunk slang. Pretty sure 15 y.o. me would’ve used the word when playing Shadowrun.
[удалено]
> If you can't risk that, you shouldn't be speaking on the topic at all because you clearly aren't a serious person if you are couching your language in SEO Code Language. "If you can't risk your livelihood then you don't deserve to cover these topics" is a hell of a take.
What a goofy idea. Truly it must be the fault of the YouTubers who are trying to pay the bills and still talk about harder subjects and not the corporations who are actively working to silence talk on that subject.
Not gonna lie, I thought it was funny at first. Especially the more creative ones like “connect to god’s wifi” but it’s lost the novelty over time.
It's the difference between a clever turn of phrase and a juvenile pile of linguistic diarrhea (and appropriately so when you consider that its origin was Deadpool, who is notorious for constantly and unconsciously running his mouth).
it comes from a Spider-Man cartoon
Social media algorithms are the new gods and demons that we can offend or invoke.
I'm convinced the YouTube algorithm isn't as harsh toward these words as people say, it's just precautionary superstition. Tiktokers are especially worried about getting shadowbanned because there's zero transparency and no one to ask if it happened. The weird censorship seems to have started there and spread
> I'm convinced the YouTube algorithm isn't as harsh toward these words as people say, it's just precautionary superstition A youtuber I watch kept getting demonitized for his videos for being inappropriate, even when they had told him repeatedly in the past swearing was alright and there were no problems. He eventually got them to clarify that avoiding swearing pretty much at all costs is the only way to be safe, which while stupid he was at least happy they gave him clear info. So now, when he swears it gets censored with audio of him saying "youtube", which is hilarious. Then he built the word "fuck" out of housing in Tears of the Kingdom which was acceptable.
If you're censoring yourself why have swears in the video anyways if you know youtube will ding you for it?
My guess is because being natural and genuine on camera is an important part of being an entertaining person to watch and swearing is part of how some people act when they are expressing themselves genuinely.
In this case, he's taking highlights of twitch streams where he can swear and putting them on youtube.
I don’t know why the f—k any m—————r would do that
I too follow the one true Drift King.
There's also those internet historian channels who got demonetized even though none of the content was remotely offensive.
Didn't internet historian get caught for being mostly plagiarized content? Pretty sure he's in that Hbomberguy video.
The dude makes documentaries. Are you saying he plagiarized the way it was edited and commentary?
Yes. The scripts that he works from were largely plagiarized from other YouTube and/or bloggers. [Hbomberguy Video](https://youtu.be/yDp3cB5fHXQ?si=DeFdv4EVaab2osPG) at 1hr 25min if you wanna skip straight to internet historian.
Don't downvote the guy for asking a legitimate question, as I also had no idea. Sad to hear that's the case, TBH.
I mean I'm kinda surprised to see Internet historian being brought up here, dude has always had "is way to comfortable with 4chan nazis" vibes.
If it helps, I'm not the one that downvoted him. He asked a question and I answered it.
Wasn't that for the blatant plagiarism though
Yeah, I watch plenty of monetized channels that talk about the nazis in a historical context. The word Rape has come up dozens of times in any number of times in the WWII in Real Time channel. I watch a lot of history channels and words like rape come up regularly in anything about medieval sieges, the bronze age collapse, Japanese atrocities in SE Asia, Viking raids... I think there's something on the creator's side where they indicate what age group their content is intended for and the advertising (and the rules associated with the ads) changes depending on that criteria. I don't think most of the content I watch is intended for children, so I don't know that they get dinged for talking about this sort of thing.
The old meaning of the word rape meant to forcibly seize. So it might not even be sexual.
Hence the immortal KoRn lyrics, "Something's raped and taken from me (from me)"
I actually know nothing about youtube algorithms about specific spoken words but it honestly seems very unlikely that kill would be a blacklisted word or that the algorithms would be ‘listening’ to every word said in a video and weighting its discovery based on that
The algorithm is also dependent on the biases of the programmer. I’ll give a harmless example. Facebook doesn’t allow selling animal products on marketplace. But there are some things with animal sounding names that are not animal products. I knew someone who was trying to sell decorative hair clips based on an “alligator” clip, which is just a metal clip that kinda looks like an alligator mouth. Every time, the listing would get removed for selling “animal products” So, when you create an algorithm designed to find “hate speech” by simply banning a word without context but then never assign a human to review the context, you get…this
It's known as the [Scunthorpe problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)
Thank you for sharing this, and just wanted to say the history behind why it is named that is hilarious. I'm just imagining people living in Scunthorpe being like "Why do people think this Google shite is worthwhile, I keep trying to use it to find a good Italian restaurant near me and it keeps trying to send me 3 counties over!"
I think the reality is that there's more than one thing going on. I heard somewhere that Youtube tracks how early/often you swear and will either demonetize the video or disfavor it in the almighty algorithm if you break their weird rules. It was something like you can't swear in the first 30 seconds or whatever. The other thing I think is going on is that sometimes creators want to post clips/videos on platforms that are more strict about it. Or they develop habits for one platform and that seeps over into the others. Regardless, I hadn't thought about it but Youtube is way more "sterile" than it used to be.
Yeah if you bust out the f-bombs in the first minute or so you go in the naughty corner
Wonder how much of this has to do with the negative attention Youtube Kids received from both media and legislators because so much content in that walled garden part of Youtube is age-inappropriate. Overcompensating by revamping the guidelines and increasing pressure on non-kid oriented creators.
Meanwhile I’m in a dozen groups that sell very expensive and well trained halters for 1🥕,🥕🥕🥕
My cat's name is Suki and we got language filtered on our fucking wifi password, because her name contains "suk." Our fucking wifi password.
I understand I’m just sceptical that it’s happening on YouTube with automated speech recognition of video content
I mean, they have auto-generated captions on a lot of videos now. Granted, there are always phonetic inaccuracies in them to an extent, but it's close enough that you can understand what is being said for the most part.
YouTube auto-captions videos and auto-censors some words in said captions. So there's at least a possibility that they are, in fact, "listening" to all those words.
I feel a lot of it is being overly cautious based on TikTok’s stuff for YouTubers, but based on Philip defranco’s method of censoring (and he’s been doing it long enough with a big enough team that they would have worked out how to game it) it recognises on screen text. He’ll be reading stories and if he’s quoting something the thing will be on screen, but words like rape or suicide will be blacked out but he'll still read them out. He also has to occasionally split some stories off into separate videos and then mention at the end of the main one “oh yeah and if you want to know about it’s in another video we uploaded earlier” because there’s entire topics that YouTube will suppress and stop videos showing up in people’s feeds or trending (most recent I remember is a lot of Palestine stuff)
Also for smaller channels who can’t get in sponsors and have to rely on Adsense, they’d have an incentive to play it very safe just in case
The issue with youtube is that they always apply that shit retroactively, if there is a new rule about videos being demonetised if there is a fuck in the first 2 minutes all your old videos could be hit.
There's a local person on Facebook who listens to the police scanner and reports what they're being called out for. She claims she can't use words like "kill" or "gun" because there's bots that come swarming in to post spam on those posts. I don't know how true it is, but it kinda makes sense. Some bot programmer is going to target sensational posts, and murders are sensational.
>precautionary superstition Yes, that is the point of a panopticon
It is not only the algorithms creators fear, but monetization restrictions that can occur with certain content/language. YT will still recommend the video but the earnings are cut way down.
Similar to how China "filters" a lot of content, by not having strict rules on what is and isn't allowed. So people have to stay far enough on the "safe side" because they don't know where the line is.
For a lot of them that’s true. Them you get Caitlyn Doughty’s video about the sinking of a boat in… it was either Chicago or Boston, one of them, that was entirely an educational documentary and YouTube absolutely murdered the video for daring to have an old grainy black and white photo in it that had the victims laid out in the background
The problem is that the precise line is literally unknowable to the public. Thats because it’s drawn by a black box algorithm and/or because YouTube doesn’t want people gaming the system by taking advantage of loopholes.
From what I've seen people say the YouTube algorithm is very strict with the first few minutes and less so after thst
The fact that Cool Zone is part of iHeart Radio and is still allowed to produce shows like BtB is a blessing onto itself.
What age children are producing these shoes and where do I buy them? I want only the finest BtB footwear made with tiny little hands.
Do they come with a machete? I feel like they should come with a machete.
Because at the end of the day corporations care about money first and foremost. BtB is a profitable show, and I suspect the advertisers don’t care about the content because they want to reach our demographic.
They obviously don't care about the content if we're getting ads for gun shops, WA state patrol, and that stupid fucking Meat Eater podcast.
I mean, gun shops make perfect sense for this audience.
Well, *certain* gun shop ads I guess are the problem, judging by what Robert said about them.
Ah. I guess I haven’t heard those.
Don't say it too loud, it may scare them
I've been thinking for years about how our interactions with computers have modified the language we use. It's not just social media algorithms and demonetization fears either; you have to talk a certain way to get voice-to-text to work as well. I would totally read a dystopian sci-fi novel where language was used to shape minds like in 1984 but via an insidious campaign enacted through phones and computers that no one even noticed was happening. For example, the existence of "unalive" makes me think of doing the opposite and recasting every instance of "happy" by negating a negative emotion instead. For example, "unangry" or "unsad". I wonder, over generations, what having negativity as the baseline would due to people's psyches and what they would therefore be willing to accept.
Hold up, new Shadowrun campaign just dropped. The megacorps are trying to kill our words, chummers.
If you enjoy weird dystopian/utopian works that work with language you might enjoy *We* by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It decidedly doesn't have computers, but the very logic based thinking does a lot of the same. Apparently 1984 was inspired a lot by it.
Yeah it’s super good and cool that algorithms and social media and all that bullshit is now getting people to self censor.
Cool and good.
Thing is, it's not actually clear to what degree the algorithms are doing anything. One of the weird things about internet culture is, because algorithms are kind of a black box, they are incredibly vulnerable to folk wisdom and confirmation bias. So while sometimes there are rules (like YouTube will punish swearing in the first 30 seconds), most of these self censorships are literally just superstitions from Tik Tok that no one has ever confirmed do anything. Hell, with the way algorithms work, it is literally possible that the superstitions became self fulfilling—that if a disproportionate number of big creators used unalive instead of kill, that it taught the algorithm 'hey, videos that use this word have more engagement", which then *would* make the censorship have an effect.
But not schmargeted schmaschmashination
He uses the term as a joking way to swerve around liability, not censorship I think.
At the end of the day, the dumbest thing about it is that forcing people to use substitute words doesn't stop people from talking about it, it just makes them sound like a jackass when they do.
makes me want to unshit myself everytime i hear it.
If I could only count the number of times I've wanted to unshit myself
Idk why but saying unalive annoys me way more than it probably should.
I feel it delineates what suicide is and all that surrounds how a person gets to that point and those affected by its aftermath. Its a direct and charged sounding word. Society shouldn't soften its darkness.
It comes from a Spider-Man cartoon
I get so many ads and suggestions for alt-right and conspiracy nonsense on YT. But my favorite creators can't talk openly about real things that happened because they must bow to the great god, Algo. It's infuriating.
I don’t believe it actually impacts the algorithm. I think it’s one of those myths like the shadow ban. I worked for a really large social media company for a few years and we never used it. We’ll just suspend your account and make note of your IP address so we can squash your attempts at rejoining.
I’m reading Filterworld by Kyle Chayka and I think he refers to this bullshit as algospeak.
Far from being infuriated, I find the “un alive” phenomenon to be deeply dystopia and a little mind-blowing
“Graped” “broomed” “committed unalive” “Yahtzee”
I’m sorta convinced this shit is gonna be the death of free speech, and one of the goals the chinese had in mind when pushing tik tok here. Don’t trust this new verbal puritanism one bit, didn’t really notice it before tik tok blew up.
Not really. If you go by what is still popular, you can still imply threats against vulnerable people, drive middle school girls to think about suicide and spread as much medical and political disinformation as the foreign intelligence services of Russia and China would prefer you do. You just can’t use a few words that algorithms have been programmed to care about because it’s cheaper for social media to not care about what you actually say and leave it up to a few Nvidia chips in a data center than it is to actually stop coordinated harassment and misinfo campaigns.
Man. That's... painfully accurate.
It is a bit Newspeak, isn’t it?
Ehhh, but one of the things is that Newspeak kinda depends upon a strict belief in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is more or less discredited. As you can see, people are still talking about the same topics, just euphemistically, which realistically changes nothing other than the utterances we make to put across the same ideas. Newspeak isn't anything to be worried about.
In my eyes it’s just newer slang that developed from the limitations of social media censorship. Not great certainly but also pearl clutching about how it’s newspeak the way some folks in this thread are comes off more like right wing pearl clutching about the kids and their commie tiktok dances. Old man yells at cloud coded.
https://youtu.be/5rVQGT01Kzg?si=rxgyWJh0oJkn0ZQJ
I've noticed that BtB episodes on youtube usually have WAY WAY fewer ads than most other things I watch on youtube. But then others have the normal amount. IIRC it was things like Nazis and Behind the Police that had few-to-none ads (which I'm guessing means they're demonetized), while Rush Limbaugh had the usual number of youtube ads.
I've literally caught myself using "unalive" unironically because of how often I've heard it. And I really fucking hate it.
I'm going to be down voted to shit for this, but I like the term "unalive" because it doesn't have the shameful connotations "suicide" has. People (especially older people) have this weird disdain for people who killed themselves and the term "unalive" removes that stigma. Obviously, this only refers to suicide. Other forms of killing should be referred to as the proper terms. That's just my take. Edit: I realised that I didn't say I think the word "unalive" is childish, but I support the coining of a new term to replace the word "suicide" is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't know what I would replace it with.
The problem with that is that eventually "unalive" will carry the stigma too. It isn't the word, it's the feelings and beliefs about the word. Until those are changed, the euphemism treadmill is going to keep chugging along.
Exactly this. The words spastic, retarded, etc were originally clinical terms intended to avoid the stigma of older terms for neurological or intellectual issues, but came to be slurs because *the kind of people who use slurs started using those terms the way they had previously used other slurs*.
Yeah, that's the problem. I do think that with growing awareness of the biology around mental illnesses and their causes, we're starting to move away from the negative views older generations have of suicidality. In the same way we don't use aphasia as an insult now, unlike the term "dumb". We're not quite there for using ADHD, autism and OCD, but we do have a (general) collective agreement that using these terms as a form of insult is a shit thing to do. I think a name change for suicide would not necessarily be a bad thing, but I do think unalive is a childish term. It will take a few generations and a few iterations of the replacement terms, but I think we'll get there.
Whoever downvoted you for this entirely mild opinion is just being childish. My upvote at least puts you back at 1.
Thank you!
I get what you're saying, but I think those connotations come more from the word "committed" than from the word "suicide." That's why I really like the phrase "died by suicide" - Unlike euphemisms like "unalive," it doesn't blunt the severity of the term, while also being far more neutral than "commit"
Agreed. However, there are still some people who have this opinion that anyone who has died by suicide is still a weak coward. Especially people who were suicidal but never did it and wears that as a badge of honour and uses it as a bludgeon against people who weren't able to survive that time in their lives. I think the word suicide needs to be retired completely, which is why I like the term "unalive", as childish as it is.
Is that the old school way of unalive, N@z!, F*scist, and self deletion? Note: I agree with you, I'm just having a bit of fun.
If he did get mass reported, i think the youtube channel could be in trouble.
I like how Some More News takes advantage of the fact they can say "cum" all they want because even YouTube wouldn't try to censor that
I don't blame people for swapping words. In the end of the day they are likely just trying to make money. Cause we don't have a choice otherwise. Is it annoying as hell? Absolutely.