cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/23396300
show transcript
nickyflowers posts:
it would be cool if websites let you be an adult on them. the advertisers and payment processors need everything to be Family Friendly though and their definitions of family and friendly are absolutely fucked. but since they’re in charge of the Internet now, no one is allowed to be an adult. tiktokers say things like “unalive” and “seggs” because they know death and sex are too adult for online. online is for idiot babies only now because they’re easier to market to
nickyflowers replies:
oh im sorry you’re a trans adult? super ban. you are super banned for life. you have upset Visa’s feelings. Mastercard is throwing up in the corner. how could you do this to Google Ads?
The companies doing this are americans and americans are pussies who think sitting in sauna naked with your same-sex family members is traumatic but watching endless gore is fun. The mindless religious zealotry, their puritan ancestors and lack of separation between church and real life is to blame.
I blame the rise of nu-puritanism on Google and payment processors. It’s a load of bullshit that people can’t even have negative feelings these days.
Yup.
If I can’t say basic words and facts like, this woman was raped, this man died, etc.
I just don’t use the website in any meaningful way.
When I was a kid in Yahoo chat rooms… I saw things man.
These kids don’t know.
Well the 4chan kids know but these normal kids don’t know.
Imagine these little faggots in an Xbox 360 COD lobby.
(I am gay so I can say that word. You can’t, and actually, neither can I (Twitter gave me a three day ban for it))
Just learn to speak russian cause russians can use every slur under the sky and they do in almost every sentance. Double standard.
If you’re American you probably need to learn Russian anyway these days. Might as well.
On one hand it’s rude not to learn the mother tongue of the country where you live. On the other hand not learning the mother tongue of the coutnry you’ve lived in all your life is peak russian culture.
The US religious fundamentalists have managed to impose their fucked up values on the world. Calling it “family values” was always a lie.
Hurting someones feelings or being offended is the worst thing an american could ever go through. It absolutely tanks ad revenue.
these people cannot be a part of society. put them on an island with no minerals and let them live in log cabins and fuck their children and do patriarchy all day.
or maybe you think that’s evil and unkind to the children, and they should just be killed and the children freed. whatever.
Peter Thiel is trying okay? Give him a break, these things take time… and Greenland (New Zealand said no)
I said log cabins, not bunkers.
also: NZ said no? good for them!
Fediverse and DNS sinkholes FTW. Any way I can avoid becoming someone’s money is nice.
Yeah, I dont understand either. Why the fuck cant you say suicide? When someone kills themselves, thats suicide, not ‘unalive’.
Whats next, people cant even say ‘unalive’?
It’s because the app reportedly limits and is more selective with videos that contain certain words. Death, rape, suicide, homicide, genocide, murder, etc. it can also pull your video. They don’t do it because they are sparing anyone’s feelings, their saying it that way to avoid their videos being taken down it hidden.
I’ve been saying for years that the advertiser-friendly neo-puritanicalism that was infecting the left was a trojan horse for conservatism, and then here we are.
How was it infecting the left?
Insistence on decorum, general anti-sex sentiments, curtailing of language to adhere to advertiser-friendly standards, to name a few.
I think all of that is true when it comes to mainstream public events, but bath houses are still a thing and queer people are still having a lot of sex. Playing to your audience is just strategic.
Bath houses are terrorism and queer people are illegal now in us.
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say, if I’m being honest.
I will say though that having sex and being pro-sex are two extremely different things, and the existence of one does not in any way imply the existence of the other.
I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say, if I’m being honest.
Advertisers didn’t change queer people, queer people changed advertisers.
I will say though that having sex and being pro-sex are two extremely different things, and the existence of one does not in any way imply the existence of the other.
How can someone have lots of sex without being pro-sex? You’re incorrectly conflating the idea of doing sexual things in general and the idea of doing sexual things in public; most Pride events are less overtly sexual now than they were in the past, but that’s not a reduction to the original goals of Pride.
Advertisers didn’t change queer people, queer people changed advertisers.
You’re not immune to marketing and conditioning. It’s not a one-way street, it’s two-way.
How can someone have lots of sex without being pro-sex?
I dunno, maybe ask the Catholic Church, or the Mormon Church, or any other famously anti-sex organization that promotes heavy breeding but still uses harmful shame tied to sex as a a means of control?
You’re incorrectly conflating the idea of doing sexual things in general and the idea of doing sexual things in public; most Pride events are less overtly sexual now than they were in the past, but that’s not a reduction to the original goals of Pride.
No, I’m not. You’re conflating being pro-sex with being sexually active.
kink@pride discourse was the first time I saw that.
C’mon, you don’t have to look very hard to find puritanical, anti-sex ‘leftists’
Yes advertisers like chase and Walmart and visa are truly the most left you can be.
I’m not calling those who craft and insist on this kind of language left, I am calling the people who accept and use it supposedly part of the left (in vague terms).
You are making my point. My point is that conservativism is charlatans and we becomes their stooges when we play according to their terms, including on the field of language.
I definitely don’t know what your point is, still. Genuinely no offense, but English is clearly not your first language and I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
Relatively easy fix though. Get away from advertiser supported platforms and use community supported ones.
Until the community supported platform becomes an advertiser supported one. Remember they said this same exact thing when moving from Facebook to Reddit.
Running is not going to save the online community. People have been running for the last 30 years, and it led us to some of the darkest times we’ve seen in 100 years. Instead we need to fight back and strategically retreat. Change the incentive structure - make advertisers absolutely miserable, and those who leech from advertisers should be similarly flogged.
Normalize supporting software and sites through donations rather than ads.
If your community dies since nobody supports it, it was shit anyway.
We agree here, but this will not necessarily stop the rot. Companies will just approach these communities and offer the leaders massive buyouts, and then flood it with ads (see Twitch).
Communities themselves need mechanisms to punish or vandalize advertisements.
Wot
First of all, who moved from Facebook to Reddit?
Second of all, both of those platforms are literally the same. Corporate owned garbage. They didn’t move anywhere. When people say move, they mean to decentralized activitypub software which can’t be corporate controlled.
People moved from Facebook to Reddit in the past because it was seen as the more community-centric platform.
This has taken a wild shift over the last 5 years; no one who moved over was hoping for Reddit becoming an ad-centric platform.
Decentralization is not a silver bullet. If lemmy.world hits 1 million users, and then a large corporation buys it, lemmy will be set back 10 years. This is an incentive problem, and no amount of workarounds is going to fix it.
funnily enough on tiktok you can say “fuckass” but you cant say someone’s intelligence is akin to that of a toaster or that someone is stupid. i have also seen the n word multiple times
Can we say braindead? Because that’s braindead.
You mean brainunalive?
I am going to beat someone to death with their own spinal column. Failing that I’ll just commit the blood eagle.
Heavy gore: Lyrics from Amon Amarth - Blood Eagle
Carved upon your naked back
BLOOD EAGLE
Skinned alive, your ribs are cracked
BLOOD EAGLE
Still alive, you gasp for air
As panic strikes your eyes they stare
Terror grips your dying heart
BLOOD EAGLE
The term “unalive” is so cringey yet dystopian that I don’t know whether to feel embarrassed or concerned when I hear it.
Had their violent delights
It started out as a fun way to make light of Disney refusing to allow the word “Kill” to show up in the cartoon adaptation of Ultimate Spider-Man, now when I hear it in a youtube true crime video I want to game end myself.
And the ironic thing is that episode literally had deadpool in it. So dead’s fine but kill isn’t
Yeeted right into the search history of life
was that in the comics or cartoon?
Cartoon, Deadpool leaned on the fourth wall to say “Something’s preventing me from saying the k-word, so I guess I’m trying to unalive these people.”
It was funny because it was being used to mock censorship instead of being a form of it
I’m waiting for that word to become so popular it also gets censored, it’d be hilarious
I’ve got a list of backups:
- cooked
- spaced (see The Expanse)
- inhumed (as opposed to exhumed as one might do in removing a corpse from a grave; see Terry Pratchett’s Discworld’s Assassins Guild lingo)
- processed (as one does to food using a food processor)
- isekai’d (for the weaboos)
- truck-kun’d
- terminated (for when the Terminator movies become popular again)
- old yeller’d
- returned to sender (until the postal system collapses)
- X trimester aborted
- Peter Pan’d (as in, thrown off a cliff and expected to fly)
- Mufasa’d (or any notable fictional character whose death was a major plot point)
i like the term “zeroed” from cyberpunk as in “they got zeroed” (unsure if that is the correct spelling)
Worms games have a nice list of expressions for managing kills (or drowning)
I’d just take them from the parrot sketch.
POOLLLYY! POOLLLYYYY!! WAKE UP POOOLLLYY!!! bangs the parrot on the table See? He’s DEAD!
Old yeller’d hits different
As a Pratchett fan, I have to say unalive <> inhumed; since “unalive” = dead whereas “inhume” = kill
Most of these have clear other meanings that wouldn’t work being turned into a substituted for killed or died
I wouldn’t worry about that one too much. Death has a ton of euphemisms to soften the concept; “passing away”, “transitioning”, “going home”, etc and so on and whatnot.
My grandpa transitioned, she’s now my grandma
Sorry for your loss. On the other hand, congrats
Oooh, a trans-grand-parent!
Kicked the bucket
Bought the farm
Took their leave
Adjourned to rest
Took the long napWhat are some more?
Punched their ticket Meeting the lord No longer amongst the living Pining for the fjords
I’ve been so deep into fediverse stuff that I forgot about that. I feel blessed
Have never been on Tiktok. Have no regrets.
I mean it comes up basically every day here where people complain about censorship in a screenshot submitted to some shitpost or meme community.
#blessed
do hashtags even work here?
Hashtags are a Twitter invention and Lemmy is a decentralized reddit clone and reddit doesn’t use hashtags so no.
Kinda (no).
On Lemmy hashtags are just to format a header, as you’ve shown. However, you might see them seemingly randomly because microblog users can post to lemmy and they use them because hashtags work as tags for them.They do work for those of us on mbin
wait huh? there’s no way it’s that bad, right?
i luv y’all, fedi frens! ~ <3
Demonitising youtubers has made the Internet say
Unalive
A baby have been formed
Frick
And other shit it’s stupid and the self censoring of fuck is annoying. I mean I would love for the Americans to invent new swear words. In German the censoring almost always fail since we have way to many words for insulting or swearing. Some are always free to use.
But the Americans just censor fuck instead of getting creative. Boring as a speech of Trump.
This is just the surface-level stuff that people see and get annoyed with. This faux puritanical censorship is also used to blot out content on “sensitive subjects” that would otherwise be informative to people but harmful to the corporate or state image. It’s getting harder and harder for news on the Palestinian genocide to trend before it gets shadowbanned on any platform, just as an example.
George Carlin warned us about this 30 years ago.
I’d link to it but I’m in the middle of a severance theory video.
Twitter is filled with porn and racism but still has payment processing and ads. 4chan has payment processing. I don’t think this is a universal truth. It’s more like some sites purposefully chose to have strict guidelines for whatever reasons.
Good luck finding a Pepsi ad on Twitter lol
“Sorry guys, the ad people don’t like it.” was just an excuse, the real goal was censorship of the web.
If Corporations are allowed to set the rules as to what gets talked about and what can’t be mentioned, it’s easier to flood the net with advertisements for their products.
This was posted on tumblr where trans people being suspended by staff with no good reason is a fairly regular occurrence
I think the issue is that these platforms are motivated by advertisers. I can build a Reddit clone in a weekend and have it be ad-free. It’s not expensive to host text + urls - which was how old.reddit.com used to operate. It’s basically a few dollars a month or I could host it out of my house for the cost of electricity (and security). And, without advertisers, I don’t really care what I host so long as it doesn’t directly contributing to harming others.
The main issues are:
- No one wants to join a platform devoid of content
- Once you reach a large enough platform that people want to join, it might require revenue streams to afford the scale
- It’s hard for people to even find platforms (Google will direct you to the top 5: Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok)
The modern infrastructure hasn’t changed. It’s still HTTP and servers. The problem is internet culture. We used to use the internet as an extension of our community. We could share links, forums, etc. in person (bizarre, I know). But now the internet is our entire community. And there is little drive to participate in niche communities. People like to be heard and to engage quickly on the internet which requires a large-ish platform (Lemmy is a good example of this).
No it’s really payment processors.
There have been multiple successful ad-free websites in the past. But they still need revenue to function. Revenue their users happily pay.
But then Visa or PayPal or whoever is handling the transactions starts to pay attention and then all the sudden there’s new rules in place or else they hike fees or just stop processing payments altogether.
And on the Internet, there is no true alternative methods of payment (hint: any viable methods are quickly suppressed by those same payment processors).
So the only way any website gets big is left to the whims of advertisers or payment processors (usually both).
I have no idea why we as a people are somehow fine with private companies having a complete stranglehold on all significant online business. Why we’ve allowed the government to privatize digital transactions, subject to very little rights or protections. It’s allowing private corporations to massively suppress free speech, commerce, and social gatherings in the digital sphere.
Honestly our supposed freedoms are more and more limited these days because they only apply to public spaces, but there’s been a continual erosion of ‘public’. Where is the modern town square? If the only place you can practice your ‘rights’ is almost nowhere, do you really have those rights at all?
The government should be mandating that ‘digital infrastructure’ (ISPs, data centers, payment processors, etc) are neutral and can’t be utilized to bully others out of business. That their privileged position also comes with extra responsibilities and restrictions so you don’t have the digital equivalent of cutting off water to an abortion clinic because the water utility is pro-life.
Probably ~15 years ago I knew a guy who used to help run a large local forum, one day without warning they got cut off entirely by Google because they decided some of their content wasn’t suitable to run ads against, so that was it the entire site got blocked.
Ended up having to break the site into 2 separate domains, one advertiser friendly, and one they wouldn’t touch.
I agree with most of what you said but I feel like we are talking past each other regarding the whole payment processor piece. How do payment processors impact what ads YouTube plays before a video?
You were saying they were motivated by advertisers. That these websites can exist if only they chose not to use ads.
But hosting a website of any decent size takes money. So to pay for it you need ads OR payments from your users. Either a subscription or donation.
So if the websites, like you suggest, avoid advertisers to get away from advertiser sensibilities, they’re still subject to payment processors. Which have many of the same kind of hang ups.
Patreon has had several crackdowns on content solely because of payment processors getting upset. Patreon doesn’t care. The patreon creators are happy and their fans are happy. Everyone involved in the commerce was happy with the business. But PayPal was unhappy and the fans couldn’t send money to the people they were supporting without that middle man. So a company almost entirely unrelated gets to dictate what can and can’t be hosted on Patreon. And this has happened multiple times on multiple sites.
Primarily right now it happens to NSFW content, but there’s zero protections from PayPal and visa doing the same for LGBT content, content critical of China, etc. They’re a private company so all our rights and protections don’t apply.
Theoretically there’s an alternative. You could always make your own banking system and your own Internet (good old ‘free market’ at work) just so you can pay for your website hosting costs. Since that’s technically an option, then they aren’t legally interfering. It’s just business and they can choose not to do business with you if they want. Just as easy as building your own power grid and water system. (Though even if you did try to make your own, they’d heavily interfere to stop you).
So yes, avoiding ads will free you from their control, but it will also limit you to only the size of website that can be hosted for free. Anything of a size that would need funding is subject to these company’s morality rules. Which also makes these communities small, isolated and easily dismantled if they prove to be a problem.
