We are going to kill "unalive"

johnorourke

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".

kqr

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.

beloch

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.

probably_wrong

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. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PrequelMemes/comments/1p2t06d/new_r...

Havoc

At this stage it seems more like slang/ a signifier of being part of the group than actual need to evade censorship so don’t think it’s going anywhere

4ggr0

to me, grape and unalive seem a bit different, semantically (not sure if that's the right word). of course both appeared because of algorithmic censorship. unalive may be new, but by now it's just a synonym for suicide. sure, older people or people who are less online might not know it, but that's how language works. but in the end, suicide and unaliving both mean to kill oneself. grape on the other hand is 100% just a way to censor the word, especially because that allows people to just use a grape-emoji to ensure that people know what they mean. could be that this escapes the online word as well, as it sounds "cute", making the act of talking about this subject a bit more palatable, maybe. i get the point of the article, but it's a bit of a circlejerk to me - "huzzah, stop minding the algorithm, talk as you wish!". well yeah...but people started using these words because they couldn't use the original words, on these platforms. and now they're used to it. seems a bit "old man telling at clouds because other words are being used now". i 100% resonate with the points about the billionaire-class being involved in language and causing people to talk differently, but that's not exclusive to online platforms. always has been, unfortunately. (can't mention the word socialism or communism when talking to people, explain the same rhetoric without using these words and suddenly everything is fine, to name one example). should we go back to calling people ret##### fag####, was that censorship as well? or does language evolve and tolerances for certain words change? i really don't get the fuss about 'unalive', the more i think about it. so 'suicide' is the word we should use, not 'unalive'. is 'killing oneself' okay? what about 'self-murder', 'ending it all', 'self-destruction'? are those okay because they're older synonyms? should we overall stop using synonyms which were created to make something sound less horrific (which humans do a lot). should we still talk about master/slave in IT?

kergonath

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.

MisterMunchkin

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.

motionlessveloc

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: https://youtube.com/shorts/gbPiRqpEMKk?si=6VH9qO-T5_4wbnsz

King-Aaron

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.

globular-toast

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.

trainfromkansas

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.

dude250711

The snake of political correctness is eating itself.

_0ffh

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.

docdeek

>> 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’?

avaer

The response is simple [7-part plot to convince social media that authenticity matters more than money] Lol. How about we just GTFO off these platforms. Ironically that's something that might actually make the difference.

isoprophlex

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.

Ekaros

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.

thinkingemote

Some may find this worth a read (I found it interesting that "unalive" was first around in 2015!) Algospeak / Slang Replacement https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/algospeak-slang-replacement 2015 "unalive" usage on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563729

brador

Google started it all 2 decades ago. 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.