YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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".

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The snake of political correctness is eating itself.

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.

> If you can’t say “genocide” on any of the major platforms

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.

>> 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’?

  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.

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.

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.

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

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.

George Carlin’s bit on soft language came to mind, so I went on YouTube to rewatch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY

The top comment, as I opened the link:

> He would have hated the word "unalive".

I don't think people trying to please the algorithm are interested in freedom of expression instead of just money/"fame"

> Every parent of my cohort remembers the first time they heard their toddler finish doing something cute in their living room, and then turn around and say, “please like and subscribe!” afterwards.

No no no, it's very wrong, you are doing it wrong. Agree with the general sentiment though.

meh, people, even kids, are choosing to use that word, they choose it themselves, either out of inertia, or to appease the algorithm gods. They choose to communicate in these mediums and be subject to the unwritten rules of the algorithm, usually to maximize exposure and likes. It's not great and I would never use that language or participate in circles like that, but they have a choice and they choose to talk like that.

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.

I actually don't think this is so deep- you couldn't curse on broadcast TV and basically because Instagram is an ad platform you aren't supposed to say "bad" things on there either.

There's been endless debates here about moderation vs. censorship- on the spectrum of Hackernews to 4chan. Calling the Hackernews moderation rules "censorship" would also not be reasonable- nor do people want to visit 4chan because it's "free speech".

I think it's actually a really nice workaround that human language and english is flexible enough that we can still say exactly what we mean in a different way and everyone knows what we are talking about.

I fundamentally don't think the platforms want to get rid of the engagement these topics bring, (the last round of criticism being that they want divisive topics on the platform) and if and when they do it won't look like changing "kill" to "unalive"- the algorithm will simply be directed to silence the topic. Many such examples in China. We should be angry about the censorship we don't see and can't detect as easily instead.

Some good points here, and I definitely hate the "unalive" movement but like someone else said, it has gone beyond self-censorship to in-group signaling. But as a graybeard it is hard to not chafe at the "ungood thought-crime" vibe of the whole thing.

Mostly, I disagree vehemently with the idea that over-weighing and banning words is an effective way to change behavior positively. People that follow along happily were never the problem and changing words does nothing but move the stink of a word to the new word. It is shitty cultural rebranding and I hate that culture has been co-opted by marketers. "Unhoused" is the new homeless - ok, did we solve something? Does saying "Bob unalived himself" no longer trigger someone who lost a family member to suicide? The more we mask concepts the less clear and honest we are. Giving words an oversized signal only removes nuance and clarity and leads to less curiosity or tolerance. We judge people on the words they use, not their meaning. Talk to an 80-year-old and they will use a banned word eventually, whether or not their beliefs reflect what the word now implies. Sometimes, old people are just running old software.

I miss tolerance - it was a great concept that served America for hundreds of years. We went from a melting pot where the ask wasn't to celebrate diversity but to tolerate it. If you hate a group of people (Trumpers, Palestinians, whoever) try tolerating them first. Learn how to stand in a checkout line behind someone with a red hat without saying something about it. Until we can meet that low bar, let's stop policing words or celebrating people for using the right ones.

> The response is simple: For every message you put out, start by saying what you mean.

Sorry, I don't think this is how you're going to kill "unalive". There are already loads of people who ignore the algorithm's dictates here; you just don't see them, because of the algorithm. Sure if all the internet banded together and stopped using words like "unalive", maybe the platforms would have to change. But (prediction here) they're not going to, for two reasons.

First, the right to say "kill" rather than "unalive" isn't the hill they're going to die on. Ms Rachel and Macklemore are willing to risk their careers for Gaza's children; but most people aren't willing to risk their audience just so people can say "kill".

Secondly, people probably largely agree with what the policy is trying to do. Saying "unalive" is different than saying "kill". Violent speech on social platforms is a massive problem. The people who are most likely to act on violent speech are exactly the same people who are most likely to say "kill" rather than "unalive". Sure, there are hateful people who will say the same thing but just use "unalive" instead; but those people have demonstrated that they're aware of consequences and willing to change their behavior as a result. Such a person is far less likely to actually murder someone than someone who just uses the word "kill".

So the entire internet community switching to euphemisms is likely to make the algorithm more effective at identifying actually dangerous content. Most people are sympathetic to those goals.

Uncommonly unintuitive unpleasantness’ ("unalive") untimely undoing's unduly unnecessary.

"Unalive": unwanted? Undoubtedly.

Uninspiring? Unsure (unlike uncontroversial "undead").

Unwittingly, "unalive"'s unacceptance's unconstructive.

Unfortunately, "unalive"'ll unseat uncomplicated, unproblematic unequals.