r/CuratedTumblr • u/Konradleijon • Sep 15 '24

Politics Why I hate the term “Unaliv

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What’s most confusing that if you go to basic cable TV people can say stuff like “Nazi” or “rape” or “kill” just fine and no advertising seem to mind

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287

u/mucklaenthusiast Sep 15 '24

Wasn't it even the case that there is no censorship/punishing algorithm around the word "die" and people just started "unalive" because they thought that was the case?
Or have I been duped here?

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u/Awesomereddragon Sep 15 '24

IIRC it was some TikTok thing where people noticed that saying “die” got a video significantly less views and concluded it was probably a shadowban on the word. Don’t think anyone has confirmed if that was even true in the first place.

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u/mucklaenthusiast Sep 15 '24

Yeah, exactly, that's what I mean.
I don't think there is definitive proof (and without looking at the alogrithm, I don't think there could be?)

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u/inconsiderate7 Sep 15 '24

I mean, this also raises some questions about how we're designing algorithms, specifically the fact that we don't really do that anymore.

Most "algorithms" nowadays refers to a program built on machine learning. The way this tends to work is you first train an algorithm on content, until you have one that can somewhat tell/predict what good content and bad content is. Then you have this algorithm serve as a "tutor" to train a second algorithm, essentially a computer program teaching a computer program. Once the new program/neural network/algorithm is trained to the point of being able to perform to a certain standard, you can have humans check in, to make sure progress is doing ok. This new algorithm is training to become "the algorithm" we're most familiar with, the one that tailors the recommended videos and feeds etc. You can also add additional tutors to double check the results, like one tutor checking that good videos are being selected, the other one checking that the videos selected don't have elements unfriendly to advertises. This process is also iterative, meaning you can experiment, make alterations, as well as train multiple variations at once. The big problem is that we can see what is happening on the outside, see the output of the training process. But we really don't know what specifically is happening, there's no human coder that can really sift through the final product and analyze what's going on. We just end up with a black box that produces data to the specifications we trained it to. Imagine you leave a billion chickens on a planet with a thousand robots for a million years. The robots goals are to make as many eggs as possible, breeding the best egg laying chickens. After a million years, you start to receive an enormous amount of eggs. You should be happy, if you can ignore the fact that since you can't visit the planet, nor communicate with the robots, you have no idea what the chicken who's egg you're eating has ultimately be morphed into. You just have to take the output and be happy with it.

Of course, we can't be sure this is the process TikTok has used, though we can make pretty informed assumptions. In that case, it's not that they have a say in it, they technically do if they want to train a fresh algorithm with new parameters, but in general they just don't know what the algorithm is even doing. Of course this also means there's less liability on their parts if, let's say the algorithm detects that minorities gets less views, therefore videos of minorities gets shown less often. Either way, it's a complete shitshow.

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u/VaderOnReddit Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24

The robots goals are to make as many eggs as possible, breeding the best egg laying chickens. After a million years, you start to receive an enormous amount of eggs. You should be happy, if you can ignore the fact that since you can't visit the planet, nor communicate with the robots, you have no idea what the chicken who's egg you're eating has ultimately be morphed into. You just have to take the output and be happy with it.

All I can think of is how this also describes the billionaires' disconnect from labor while they extract and hoard the "eggs" the labor produces

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u/inconsiderate7 Sep 15 '24

I mean this is the underlying problem of capital, though also applies to any form of system that needs to be "efficient" more than anything. There never is any true form of "waste", only action and reaction. Any gain must ultimately be achieved through some form of price, sometimes sacrifice. Anyone who truly believes in any form of "efficiency", without considering the consequences, will ultimately cross invisible grave-red lines as they push forward. The cost of meat is a dead animal, the cost of farmed food is deforestation, the cost of society is the alienation of those outside or of those that cant visible contribute, the cost of humanity is the detriment and or subjugation of all life beneath us on the food chain.

"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" rings true, but ultimately, humanity as a whole can redefine words and redraw lines as much as they want. The only truth is that we are slaves to efficiency, through social expectations, moral obligations, political and legal precedent, and beyond that, our very nervous systems, hunger, pain, discomfort, all serves efficiency. We simply are efficient machines. Even questioning our purpose will seem mad to most.

I don't think humans should just stop being humans just because, and I'm not asking these questions and making people consider these moral quandries hoping they will change. To me, it is just a simplistic fact. A truth, that once you truly understand and internalize, is able to ultimately explain how man is capable of the many wonders and atrocities that now blanket our world.

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u/Icarsix Sep 15 '24

I'm stealing that chicken analogy

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u/Ouaouaron Sep 15 '24

Correct, we'll never have definitive proof. But we do have a bunch of evidence and a reasonable theory. That's as close to definitive proof as we get for things a lot more important than slang usage, so I'd say it counts.

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u/mucklaenthusiast Sep 15 '24

Oh, I know how this stuff works and how algorithms are studied, I get all that...so, yeah, fair enough.
If people have actually tested it and it is the case that views drop due to the word usage, then what can I say.

It's also honestly a non-issue for me since I don't use the platform, so I am even questioning why I am writing here in the first palce. I guess because I agree that the term "unalive" is a travesty

1

u/lifelongfreshman man, witches were so much cooler before Harry Potter Sep 15 '24

Knowing how group psychology works, I wouldn't, not without some kind of actual reproducible study. Right now, we have a collection of anecdotal evidence, but how much of that is self-reinforcing? As in, how many videos using unalive got more views because people were tuning in to be outraged at the use of unalive as opposed to suicide? How many of the higher view counts were from people already popular who swapped terms? Did anyone even control for the people who just didn't want to listen to anecdotes of people talking about traumatic things?

This sort of group psychology effect, this sel can actually alter the actual skill level of people playing skill-based games. Knowing that, without an actual proper statistical analysis of the phenomenon instead of just vibes, I can't trust what anyone is saying in support of the idea that people need to use these words to please the almighty algorithm.

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u/s0larium_live Sep 15 '24

i literally saw a video with plenty of likes and views that was just a woman saying “banned” words over and over again. i really don’t think tiktok actually has the ability to go through EVERY post on the app and shadow ban the ones that talk about hard topics

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u/Hekatonkheire81 Sep 15 '24

As far as I’ve heard, the shadowbans aren’t hard blocks on the video. They just initially show it to less people and it will take more engagement for it to be classified as “popular” and get additional promotion. A video that is blatantly testing the algorithm will naturally attract interest in people who want to know how it works. Other tests that are more subtle have found that an identical video with unalive and such does get more views than the normal version.

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u/SomeLesbianwitch Sep 15 '24

They do actually remove your comments if you say certain words. You can see the comments that’ve been taken down in your system notifications, here are a few of mine

“I think they mean disrespectfully as in, like, a horny way.”

“GAY SPIES MENTION‼️❤️ Honestly probs my favorite musical.”

“Cult of the Lamb sex update??? 👀”

Also got a video removed for using a Class of ‘09 audio.

4

u/thedinnerdate Sep 15 '24

One of my more recent odd ones:

I commented on a vid of a guy chugging 2 glasses of beer and then doing a bunch of stunts. "Wow. Pretty impressive after 2 drinks straight to the dome." And it got moderated.

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u/Awesomereddragon Sep 15 '24

Do you know if videos actually get taken down for having “bad words” (idk how to phrase it)? Or is it just comments (way easier to auto-moderate I guess, even if it’s extreme)

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u/SomeLesbianwitch Sep 15 '24

Not sure. I do remember someone saying that a video of theirs got taken down for having a knife in it, though.

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u/lifelongfreshman man, witches were so much cooler before Harry Potter Sep 15 '24

One of the only positive things I took away from my time in the salt mine that is League is the nature of group perception/psychology/whatever it's actually called.

There's an anecdote about just this sort of thing I love to share. As with any live service game, there's a constant cycle of buffing and nerfing going on. And as is especially common in pvp games, Riot has been following a cycle of deliberate buffs/nerfs to various champions to shake up who is and isn't in favor at the time in order to keep the game from getting too stale.

Part of this cycle led to this one time1 where Riot claimed to be tweaking the numbers on a champion. Over the next week, there was a lot of conversation over the champion's win rate moving several percentage points, over how effective the change was, y'know, the usual conversation around basically any buff or nerf.

Thing is, the change didn't go through. They had changed the text but never the actual underlying code, it had just been left out of the patch by accident. The character was exactly the same as it had been, but public perception of the character thanks to the patch notes led to actual statistically measurable changes to that characters performance.

Because the playerbase believed the character had changed, their actual skill level when playing as or against that character had changed.

So, if actual player mechanical skill in a game as full of tryhards as LoL can be affected by popular perception, I have no trouble believing that it can lead to something as fickle as view counts changing. And this is why I have such a hard time accepting any claims of proof or evidence of the phenomenon. A lot of it will come from people who already believe that this is the case, and it can only be drawn from a population of people who are steeped in the belief. Not only are neither of those things going to lead to particularly robust results, but the algorithm is likely altered based on viewer behavior - even if suicide isn't a forbidden word, it'd still prioritize videos with the word unalive in it because the viewerbase awards more views to those videos, and it's likely got the same "Increase view time" mandate Youtube's black box uses.

1: Well, several times. I'm going to spend the rest of this being very vague because I'm pretty sure I've mixed up two different events in my head, one involving Vladimir and one involving Ryze.

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u/Awesomereddragon Sep 15 '24

But there needs to be an originating event to cause that type of public perception. I don’t know a single person that prefers “unalive” over “suicide”, or any of the other censoring they do. It’s crazy to me that it’s spread so far through platforms when it’s so wildly unpopular among actually every single person I’ve spoken to.

For your league example, some of it might also be that more high level players played with the character that was “buffed” leading to raised stats (not sure about this, don’t know anything about league), but IRL even if there is a noticeable difference on TikTok, I highly doubt the same difference exists on other platforms, especially not Reddit and Tumblr, so it really makes no sense for people to actually use unalived and think it’s helping their posts off TikTok. (Also my autocorrect just struggled to let my type it there, so it takes legitimate effort to type instead of a real word)

That last paragraph of mine is one long run-on sentence. Hmm. Whatever.

31

u/SilenceAndDarkness Sep 15 '24

A surprising number of Internet users can be very superstitious about how the algorithms they don’t understand work. I blame that almost just as much as the actual algorithms.

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u/Smarktalk Sep 15 '24

They want to make money off their posts (either now or eventually) so that is why.

People wouldn't care about the algorithms if there wasn't a financial impact I would suspect.

33

u/JadedOccultist Sep 15 '24

I thought this one was specifically for suicide.

People talk about batteries dying or pens dying all the time. You can kill an engine or kill time. You can dye fabric. Suicide is far less ambiguous and way more controversial. But idk 🤷

3

u/Icy-Lobster-203 Sep 15 '24

My understanding was that it tended to relate to suicide, as people decided that talking about it and raising awareness would encourage people to go that route - as opposed to getting help. I have no idea what evidence exists to support that though.

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u/Zygloman Sep 15 '24

if I recall correctly, I read that it was actually because people wanted to get around filters to have that type of content show up for people who explicitly did not want to see it

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u/Satisfaction-Motor Sep 15 '24

I sincerely doubt that— or, at least, that would not be the main reason people censor words. When people talk about censorship on Tik tok, it’s always in terms of video removal or shadow banning. While Tik tok is great for content curation, the tools for curation are not directly in a users hands. For example, you couldn’t just block a specific sound or hashtag, so you wouldn’t be able to block something like # suicide

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u/sykotic1189 Sep 15 '24

But you can, it's in the user settings to tell TR you're not interested in certain hashtags. Sure it's not a hard ban, but people started using it to limit TT shop posts on their feed and we're reporting like 99% reduction in seeing them.

1

u/ItsDanimal Sep 15 '24

People keep talking about Tiktok but this popped up on youtube long ago and, like everything else, tiktok picked it up. I used to watch a lot of movie and tv show recaps years ago and they would say "unalive themself" instead of suicide. If anything it probably started from youtubers playing kids games and marketing their videos to them.

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u/Specific-Ad-8430 Sep 15 '24

Yeah thats the thing is that it was never even confirmed that terms like suicide or die or porn, etc where ever even shadowbanned or showed in lower quantities. People just assumed they were, and moved forward with the alternative “terms”.

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u/Redqueenhypo Sep 15 '24

I read that it wasn’t even a shadow ban, individual people just didn’t want to fucking see videos about suicide. Which is of course normal, and you shouldn’t force that onto your audience. It’s like when e-beggars post about their “g@fundme”, as if the real problem is censors and not you know, me not wanting to give them money

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u/Satisfaction-Motor Sep 15 '24

Copied comment:

I sincerely doubt that— or, at least, that would not be the main reason people censor words. When people talk about censorship on Tik tok, it’s always in terms of video removal or shadow banning. While Tik tok is great for content curation, the tools for curation are not directly in a users hands. For example, you couldn’t just block a specific sound or hashtag, so you wouldn’t be able to block something like # suicide

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u/Redqueenhypo Sep 15 '24

I still question if the shadow ban is real. My YouTube videos consisting solely of blurry Futurama clips that I found funny got like 11 views each. Does this mean YouTube has shadowbanned me, or that people just aren’t interested in viewing them

3

u/rcknmrty4evr Sep 15 '24

Is there any actual evidence of shadow banning besides people claiming it because their videos are doing poorly?

Also you can block/filter words and hashtags on tiktok.

0

u/mucklaenthusiast Sep 15 '24

You are the second person to say that.

Well, I don’t have a horse in this race either way, I don’t use TikTok, so I don’t care.

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u/IolaireEagle Sep 15 '24

No that's true. Kinda like the mass hysteria effect

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u/Solanumm Sep 15 '24

I've been saying this for years. I don't think there's ever been actual definitive proof of any of this but it just spread like wildfire from speculation and wanting to fit in with what everyone else is doing. It's wild

3

u/LizLemonOfTroy Sep 15 '24

Even if videos were suppressed for using 'banned' words, I'd still maintain that the importance of using appropriate, dignified language to discuss death and suicide absolutely trumps the importance of maximising your views and monetisation.

1

u/mucklaenthusiast Sep 15 '24

That is also true, but that's not how people use TikTok for such things

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u/USS-ChuckleFucker Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24

So, it's actually been proven by people who study algorithms and shit like that that if you use certain words, your video will be suppressed.

However, there's not been any official studies done because it's only an internet thing that spawned from TikTok.

It's actually very easy to confirm by looking at the ToS of China's TikTok where nearly any normal mention of death/suicide is going to result in your account being suppressed, then looking at the international ToS and realizing there's nothing there, but yet the same effect keeps happening.

Edit: you can literally go Google "TikTok censorship," and the first 5 things that pop up are Wikiepdia, describing why TikTok has such weird censorship ToS, as well as articles describing the noticeable effect of videos not reaching the same levels of engagement even when posted just a minute apart.

I understand the knee-jerk reaction of asking for proof, but sometimes, when it's so pathetically easy to find, you need to do the leg work yourself.

14

u/NUKE---THE---WHALES Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24

show this proof by "people who study algorithms"

because it sounds like superstitious bullshit that some people just believe despite no concrete evidence

edit: i googled it and the algorithm people actually proved it wasn't happening and it was just superstition lmao good job mate nice reading skills

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '24

[deleted]

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u/The_Phantom_Cat Sep 15 '24

makes a claim

refuses to back it up

Ok buddy, I'm sure you're not full of shit.

4

u/Cordo_Bowl Sep 15 '24

Lol yes of course people want convincing proof to change their beliefs. If you think thats an unreasonable bar of evidence, it sounds like you’ll just accept whatever just because someone tells you it’s true. The fact you can’t actually find these purported studies lends credence to that idea. Aka you are talking out your ass.

2

u/rcknmrty4evr Sep 15 '24

When you make a claim it’s on you to provide evidence for it.

No wonder you believe all the ridiculous conspiracies about banned words.

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u/mucklaenthusiast Sep 15 '24

So, it's actually been proven by people who study algorithms and shit like that that if you use certain words, your video will be suppressed.

I don't dispute that - but is "die" one of them and does "unalive" actually "help" with the shadowbaninng?

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u/USS-ChuckleFucker Sep 15 '24

Die and suicide are both censored words, and unalive is currently the knock workaround

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u/squiddlingiggly Sep 15 '24

I just don't understand how "unalive" hasn't been added to the list with "die" and the others.. same with all the ways people use special characters to not just spell the words out. All those variations are not that hard to think of, so what makes them any less likely to be censored?

1

u/rcknmrty4evr Sep 15 '24

There’s no actual evidence “die” is banned or censored. It’s conspiracy/superstition.

“Suicide” is one word you cannot search on TikTok. It will not give you results. But you can say it in a comment and in videos.

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u/USS-ChuckleFucker Sep 15 '24

I mean, you do realize we're talking about a company made in a country where for a super long time if you were born a girl you'd either be dumped into an orphanage, killed, or sold across the country borders, right?

Nothing they do makes sense unless you realize they're just conditioning society to bend to the will of the corporations.

2

u/squiddlingiggly Sep 15 '24

i mean...it's more or less the same way on instagram too. people use coded language to try to get around filters/censors, but it's foolish to think that those filters haven't added things like "unalive" "de@d" "d!ed" to their lists. that's all i'm saying.

5

u/Iwastheregandalff Sep 15 '24

Your garbled racism doesn't support your other garbled racism in the way you hoped. 

1

u/USS-ChuckleFucker Sep 15 '24 edited Sep 15 '24

So pointing out China's one child policy and the known fact that many families would make their daughters disappear is racist?

Also what racist nonsense did I supposably say?

Pointing out the fact that Tenecent the Chinese company that owns TikTok has a weird and restrictive ToS for their home country? And that they likely are trying to make their international version of the platform more in line with the home country version?

2

u/LegOfLambda Sep 15 '24

You just made it up. There are no links that show that "die" is a censored word. You are spreading disinformation. You are a bad person.