'Unalive'

It's fascinating that "advertisement" is effectively the large-scale way of manipulating as many people as possible into something that they wouldn't otherwise want, all backed by big money.

Consider that the primary worth of big tech companies like Google and Meta is effectively their potential to advertise, and these companies are the most highly rated stocks in the world. That shows you how much money can be extracted by professionally manipulating people, and how big of a deal this really is.

Advertisement must be recognized as something that hurts the people, and must be shunned.

Doubleplusungood

Turns out it wasn't the authoritarian governments that would rewrite the dictionary, it was tech corporations appeasing advertising and payment corporations.
- I mean, said corporations are empowered to be able to do this by authoritarian governments that are largely bought and paid for by said corporations, who now run said failed democracies as puppet governments of corporate interests.
- It all sounds like something that Douglas Adams would write.
- Is there even a difference when those corporations collectively own the government?
- it was glaringly obvious on youtube, content creator had to be careful of what they say.

They'll just ban the new terms eventually if they get big enough.

It's just another form of taboo for the euphemism treadmill honestly. Like there was a time that what a lot of people now know as the r-slur was a term to try to destigmatize those conditions. When that was the polite and civilized way to refer to someone with developmental or intellectual disabilities. This is just a taboo created top down rather than bottom up.
- I mean, when I did physics in high school (in Norwegian) the correct term for something slowing down was retardation, as opposed to speeding up, acceleration.
  I wonder if this still is the case, the dictionary is updated all the time, as words take on new meaning, and that's fine. I'm not fussed by the whole master to main in git, for example, though I'd prefer trunk.
  I will get unnecessarily vocal if someone makes a point of saying that it's pronounced jif though...
- and we will keep updating the dictionaries until we address the root causes (slow, difficult, and unlikely)
- Idiot was originally a purely medical term for mental disability, as was moron, retard, and now even the term "mentally disabled" is falling out of favor for "intellectual disability"

Maybe this is because I’m an old gen x, but I do not self censor online. Ban me, mute me, downvote me…I don’t give a fuuuuuccccckkkk!

We're on Lemmy. No advertisers to alienate!
- Still plenty of power-tripping mods, though.
You would if your primary source of income was posting content on one of these platforms.
- That’d be a sad existence.

If only there were social media platforms which aren't controlled by advertisement revenue.

I sometimes find it really hard to understand why people keep subjecting themselves to these kind of things.

because advertisment companies pay content creators either directly or indirectly, and many people stick around platforms to watch their favourite content creators. being funny online has become a day job for many, and with the job market being the way it is being an "influencer", even if a niche one, pays better than a "real" job.
i'm not trying to excuse anyone here, it just is the way it is. do i like it? not really. but i also wouldn't want people who make a living working as "online funny person/influencer" to suddenly lose their income. if we got rid of ad companies a lot of things would have to change at the same time for nobody to get hurt in the process.
when i stop being broke i'm going to sign up for nebula, that place seems to be trying to change things for the better in this regard
- Aw man nebula is great. I totally recommend it to anyone with the extra disposable income. I got into it because Dr. Simon Clark (climate scientist YouTuber) had a discount link on one of his videos and it turned out that a bunch of other creators I like are on it, like HelloFutureMe and NotJustBikes. The only thing I feel like it’s missing is comments on videos, but I get that moderating that would be a lot, and while I like to know what other people think, I’m willing to sacrifice that for an overall better experience
- yt barely pays enough for most content creators, they have brand deals and promotions, and people like trahearn or beast has some shitty food in thier name, or rely on patreon. youtube also makes the worst out of the content creators, some turn into pos over time.
- I think the point of the post is that the solution being used to this problem creates other issues. If you instead spoke freely and beeped yourself, people would get what you are saying and the censorship would be more in your face.
- What is nebula?
- do you remember, when advertisement was OK? i used YT for a long time without adblocker. there where funny animations on the side of the video, a mildly annoying bar at the bottom with an easily clickable close button. Youtubers where funny, edgy and talked the way they wanted.
  i think advertisement that way is OK: sometimes slightly annoying but it paid for the Youtubers and the platform, while not influencing the content.
People do this shit on Lemmy too where there is no reason to.
- In fairness, that's mostly through memes that have been nicked from other,more ad-laden sites.
- I habitually downvote all unnecessary censorship here
To be fair, when it comes to youtube the engagement on alternatives doesn't exactly seem very robust. Somebody linked a peertube the other day saying it was a great one with a lot of content, and the vast majority of videos I saw on the front page had 0 views, with a handful having views in the single digits. That's not really a viable alternative for a site with hundreds of millions of potential viewers.
- The problem is: people want alternative, but they don't want to pay for it. See the hatred for paywalls and love for 'piracy' here, on Lemmy. People won't pay directly, so advertisements will stay.
  I hate this model.

Quite literally 1984.

double plus exactly

Why do you care about what advertisers want unless you are getting paid by them?

Because advertisers dictate the language of every single major social media.

I fucking hate them because they arose to deal with algos.

People should not fucking please the machine. They are there to serve US

I saw a YouTube video recently in which the word "drinking" was censored. It's ridiculous.

this post made me commit sewerslide

Advertising is an incoherent industry where it is generally understood and accepted for people to pay to not receive the product. Pay your advertising protection money or your content will be interrupted. Absolute racketeering.

Let's murder kill suicide our rape drugs molestation stories to death. I like no ads on Lemmy, though.

I have been downvoted to hell for saying this exact thing on Lemmy

Just use the word “oligarchs” instead of “advertiser” because that resets the tech brains.
Which is silly because you won't be censored here with no advertising.
I've used it too when talking about myself because I like the term. Same with "opt out" instead of suicide

The problem is always the money, for example YouTubers get paid because of publicities, that's why they say "unalived" and not killed, because if they do they get demonetised.

Or banned ofc.

That's why I like it here, you can say penis and not get spermabanned.

Has anyone ever actually gotten in trouble for saying "killed?"
- You really don't get in trouble. Youtube's AI will demonetize the video or the entire channel if it decides it doesn't like the words you said. Which means no ad-sense money.
  and there is no official list of words that Youtube doesn't like. Youtubers can only make educated guess based trial and error. It probably works a lot like the algorithm that shadow deletes comments.
  Theres wide agreement that suicide, kill, murder and rape will result in demonization. Some times you have say a combination of those words to trigger it. Happens more often to certain channels (usually the smaller ones) while others can say whatever and never have a video demonetized (usually the corporate owned channels)
  eitherway youtube's AI doesn't forgive and once you're on it's shit list your channel is fucked and you might as well delete it.

Tumblr is marking posts as adult just for being posted by transgender people

It's cringy because they are letting advertisers direct culture.

I call them algorisms.

I was amused when I learned PDF file. As in Jeffrey Jones is a PDF file.

Donald_Trump.pdf

IIRC the unalive and grape garbage didn’t start out being an advertiser thing, it was a China thing because that who controls your brain aka TikTok.

It might be an advertiser thing now, but it’s also always been a hostile foreign government thing too.

People were using "unalive" on YouTube before TikTok even existed.
- For those keeping score in the audience, there was a 2013 episode of Ultimate Spider Man that used "unalive", and Tik Tok launched in 2016.
  It kind of surprised me.

I'm all for political correctness.

Or good old fashioned politeness as it used to be called before the right-wing got all pissy about it.

I suppose it's like someone saying "duck" instead of "fuck"; or those old curse filters in online games that blocked words like "analysis" so it became @nalysis instead.

What you're seeing is a mix of "professionalisation" and "protect the children" - essentially "you are in a place of work that has children" when you're on a platform. This is, of course, completely fucking nuts and defies logical analysis.

Folks find a way round, so you end up with work around terms, and the like. What we really need is a "kidsnet" - a heavily filtered version of the net for kids that limits communication options and auto filters content.

What we really need is a "kidsnet" - a heavily filtered version of the net for kids that limits communication options and auto filters content.
Then you will risk having the next generation having communication issues because they can't express themself freely.
- So... Pretty much where we are now?
essentially "you are in a place of work that has children" when you're on a platform. This is, of course, completely fucking nuts and defies logical analysis.
Haha. It's so obvious and funny once you've pointed it out, but I hadn't made that connection myself yet! Thank you!

IMO platforms that filter such words are in need of replacement. Easier said than done, but best acknowledged as soon as possible.

I remember when "an hero" was used, was always surprised people moved to "unalive"

Understanding what "an hero" implies requires a measure of understanding that you generally wouldn't have unless you used 4 chan, or one of the platforms where 4 chan folks hung out....
"Unalive" requires no prior explanation or context, which makes it far more accessible. It's intuitive, the same way "unpack" is the opposite of "pack" (and dozens of other examples). So the prerequisites are basically baked into the English language.
Because of this, I'm entirely unsurprised at the change in wording.

Social media just became an outlet for some people to let out steam. Unfortunately, not all people are able to turn around to fix their own personal issues, but instead end up succumbing tragically because they feel they no longer have power, and so they publicize their final deed, literally issuing their suicide notes online. That's why you have these social media corporations seeking to control suicide ideation by means of removing language connected to suicide.

Don't patronize those platforms.

On the other hand, there’s something kind of beautiful about the way language is able to adapt to hostile conditions.

Strangely, the linguistic contortions of social media are one of the few things that give me hope that LLMs won’t completely destroy mass communication.

"Unalive linguistic enshitification!"

News flash: you will never send a stronger message than ignoring advertisers and their whipping boys.

I mostly feel the same way, but it's not without purpose. It allows for discussions of those issues on platforms that would otherwise ban it. Platforms like tiktok are so far reaching that it's almost an acceptable trade.

It's allowing the use of a platform that would otherwise be unavailable, instead of being relegated to the dark corners of the internet where no one will see it. Awareness is the first step.

I'll put this up front, just to make it clear: I'm not going to sit here and say that advertiser's should hold any power over what we say or how we say it. In general, modern advertising is a cesspool of shit.

With that said, advertiser's have one main goal, to reach their target audience, and endear them to your product so they go out and buy it. If you're advertising on a platform like YouTube, there's going to be a nontrivial amount of pretty much every demographic, which is uncomfortable with such difficult topics or the words associated to them.

So I don't think it's surprising that they wouldn't want to advertise to their demo along side content that would upset or otherwise make their demo uncomfortable.

Building on this point, advertiser's are just reacting to a very real issue that some have with some words and terms. They might be upset or triggered or otherwise made uncomfortable/unhappy by hearing some things being said; I think it's respectful to those who would be triggered by other terms for "unalive"

100% agree. ridiculous that people are allowing their online lingo to affect their irl speech

So, if my channel is monetized anyway, I can say whatever I want, since I don't care about advertisers?

Oh great. "unalives" is my term for a group of people in my D&D world who were sort of turned into ghosts by a vast magical accident. They were actually shifted into a demiplane created by the accident, but to outsiders they appear to be ghosts. Anyway if I eventually publish the world am I going to offend people and get accused of queer/transhate or slangjacking or something? I made it up many years ago when social media was MySpace, or even earlier.

The lefts Jordan Peterson

nah, this was far too comprehensible

It's interesting that now the narrative is that all these words are being censored due to advertisers.

By my memory, at least some subset of these terms was being self-censored because they were triggers or considered offensive for other readers / users of various sites and people were trying to protect others by avoiding words that upset them. That's what I was told about words like rape, suicide, and profanity like fuck, bitch, etc. At the time when I was first noticing a strong trend towards self-censoring, most of the sites I was seeing it on had little to no advertising, particularly not from major brands, so this while that may be the reason for the trend to continue, I'm not convinced that's why it started or how it became widespread.

That's exactly how I remember it too (1). The movie 'PCU' is a nice period piece. Those 'activists' might not have intended it, but this is the logical consequence of their actions. They were the start of this cycle of the censorship machine. Advertisers simply want to reach the largest crowd, the highest common denominator, devoid of value, so they pandered.

I really like self censorship, but hate the reason behind its popularity.