Self-censorship practices as anti-shibboleth

I'll admit to being the kind of person who gets irrationally tilted when I see people bringing self-censorship practices from TikTok or Instagram to other websites which do not have algorithmic censorship.

I'm talking about the practice of replacing words like "die", "kill", "sex", "ass", etc. in speech or texts with extremely obvious euphemisms - "unalive", "seggs", "ahh", etc.

The main reason I dislike it is that the site where I most often see this behavior imported - Reddit - does not censor comments or posts which use "adult" terms. When people avoid "sex", "ass", "die," etc. on Reddit, it means that they do not understand the website where they've chosen to post. Most crucially, it indicates that they do not understand that human moderators moderate subreddits. Those humans have some agency over the strictness of each subreddit's moderation policy.

In my experience, self-censoring adult terminology on that site in particular is a great sign that you're dealing with someone so incurious, with such a limited experience of online conversation, that they don't understand where they are, or who they're dealing with, or who's accountable for maintaining the peace in the community where they're speaking. I do not want to read the things these people write, and I do not want to talk to them. I'd rather not be the person who teaches them to be curious.

Everyone who posts online struggles to understand the environment where they're posting. Even on old-school, human-moderated forums, posters were not privy to the moderation discussions the admins and mods were having behind their backs. Communities can only persist when people know "the rules," and online moderation must necessarily obscure some of "the rules," even in situations where humans are just moderating communities of their friends. I moderated a Bionicle forum as a 12-year-old, and even then I would occasionally find myself in the middle of arguments between two people where I had to keep certain things private from each person.

Still... you can figure out the rules, mostly by lurking. What I want is for the people where I post to indicate that they have, despite the challenges, figured out what the rules are. Actively demonstrating that they have tried to learn "the rules" is how I learn that they can be trusted and respected.

I think that one of the worst things social media has done is to create environments where people feel that they do not have to know the rules, and that they themselves do not contribute to the rules, and that they could never personally end up in a position where they are accountable for enforcing the rules themselves. This is why the self-censoring weirdoes in the places where I post feel like such interlopers, to me.

They're aliens from another planet, bringing their passivity and incuriousness with them, often into communities where people are desperately holding on to the agency and curiosity they kept from the before-times.

Most of the critiques I've seen of "algospeak" miss the mark, for me. If you see someone getting in a fight about it online, they're probably going to accuse the algospeaking poster of being a child. That's the wrong tack to take, I think. You should instead be accusing these people of not understanding the website where they're posting, and not caring enough to read any of the other posts!

Even kids can learn how to do that. I did it when I was twelve. I then ended up moderating arguments about art theft and people stealing one another's Bionicle OCs in fanfiction. The power may someday be yours!!!