"Unalive linguistic enshitification!"

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

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.

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.

I call them algorisms.

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.

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

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

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.

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