I’ve noticed that people will replace certain words with euphemisms, like “suicide” will get turned into something like “self-deletion”. or they’ll censor a letter, like “rape” will become “r*pe”

is it helpful to do that? like if I’m writing a CW, should I avoid using words like “rape” or “suicide” and use a more euphemistic or censored version instead?

@kasdeya euphemisms makes filtering harder and are used only to avoid the algorithms on other social medias — just say rape or suicide

@Lili good to know - thank you!

@kasdeya From what I have observed this is proprietary social media brianworms leaking into the fediverse.

The reason why people censor “controversial” words on proprietary social media is because they fully depend on recommendation algorithms, to make posts show up on other people’s timelines, as even the act of following someone does not guarantee that this person will see the post.

Proprietary social media often blacklists specific keywords and this causes the post to become invisible to your followers, requiring you to censor them.

On the fediverse this type of censorship is completely pointless.

@SuperDicq oh wow that sounds like such a stifling environment to talk to friends tbh - I’m really glad Fedi isn’t like that. and thank you for the reply! this is really good to know

@kasdeya Yes, this is mostly why the fediverse is great.

You don’t have to find ways around stuff like censorship and automated copyright infringement detection. You can just post what you want.

@kasdeya

I’ve noticed that people will replace certain words with euphemisms, like “suicide” will get turned into something like “self-deletion”. or they’ll censor a letter, like “rape” will become “r*pe”

I hate zoomers who use newspeak. It’s probably cuz of asinine moderation on mainstream social media though instead of any desire to be less offensive. Anyhow the meaning is the same so it’s not helpful at all lol, and shit like “self deletion” could be considered disrespectful if anything.

@kasdeya@cryptid.cafe
If you wanna be considerate a content warning is definitely enough

@SuperDicq @kasdeya i can only speak for twitter, but there was another reason for that specific type of self-censorship where only certain letters were changed: avoiding harassment from people who would search controversial words to cause trouble in the replies. it was still legible to anyone who saw it on their timeline but much harder to find via search

@rowan @kasdeya I wouldn’t use different words for this reason. People you can just block.

@SuperDicq @kasdeya it’s easier to t*pe like this than to block 100 people jumping into your replies because they think its funny to brigade

@rowan @kasdeya Or you just set your post to “followers only” and it will no longer show up in search.

@SuperDicq @kasdeya i’m not sure what the argument is – i’m not advocating for doing it here because fedi generally has better tools for moderating this type of behavior. it had a purpose outside of your reply though – which was avoiding harassment.

@kasdeya Joining in with the choir, these are indeed new habits that are born from skirting overzealous advertisers-first moderation of corporate social media. And they do indeed make post filtering harder, so its better to stick to the real words behind the meaning. Also removes the need for a bunch of mental lifting to parse a sentence.

@rowan @kasdeya My argument is that there’s better tools for avoiding harassment.

@kasdeya Wei have heard it is better to use the full word instead as it makes it easier for creatures to block unwanted discussion topics from their fediverse access point of choice,,, at least that is what wei have heard so far if anymany has opinions on opposite procedures

@kasdeya as someone who's affected, reading "sui" hurts less than reading "suicide", and it's still filterable, so I'd prefer if people did that. many do do that.

@kasdeya

it's almost always better to just use an uncensored word, censoring bypasses filters