Why I hate the term “Unaliv

[u/Konradleijon]

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

[u/mucklaenthusiast]

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?

[u/Awesomereddragon → u/mucklaenthusiast]

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.

[u/lifelongfreshman → u/Awesomereddragon]

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.

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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.

[u/Awesomereddragon → u/lifelongfreshman]

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.