Nire Bryce

i know its bc of youtubes monetisation restrictions but i lose a non-negligeable amount of respect for people who censor words in their videos lol

The thing is that there's ways to evade demonetization that don't involve bleeping yourself or using cutesy TikTok euphemisms. There's a million fairly normal-sounding ways to say someone passed away, their life ended, their injury was fatal, etc... before you get to "unalive."

I hate to sound like my high school teacher saying "swearing means you aren't creative enough to say it another way!", because the monetization rules are fucking stupid. I know it's harder to filter for hate speech than for single words, but it's so goddamn insulting that Nazis get to quibble about "um but it's my sincerely held belief" and yet saying certain synonyms for "make love" or "go to the bathroom" is beyond the pale

but at the same time, from a position of being unable to change those rules... I do think saying "f*ck" means you aren't creative enough to say it another way, because c'mon, there's so many options available to you

I found this Google Sheets list of words that get you demonetized on YouTube, and it's not 100% reliable because the rules aren't public or consistent, and I realize "demonetized" isn't "banned," they're just advertisers not wanting their content to appear on a video about cancer or how to use a condom...

but even so it's still very strange that according to this list, some topics you could not monetize are:

• My Favorite Shows To Binge Watch
• How To Dye Your Hair Blonde
• Recipe for Hot Sauce
• Why Jews Celebrate Purim
• A History Of LGBT Scientists

like, again, these aren't forbidden, they're just "controversial," but how fucked up is it that if enough people hate you or have a fetish for you, it becomes controversial for you to mention yourself

"unalived" and similar tiktok vocabulary is also pretty ineffective in the long term when applied to multiple platforms, because you did all that work of standardization but now you're easier to censor than if you were using the collection of common euphemisms!

look the only way discord stops being a place people use for development and software support for their tiny projects is if there's a better chat system that exists, that, get this, has enough value to get people to actually create an account on it.

you gotta do the work to build that. people pick discord because loading in a discord bot (better to think of these as "extensions" or "plugins") doesn't require learning docker compose or figuring out selfhosted Discourse, etc. It needs to be free. it NEEDS to be free. because otherwise that's yet another cost for a labor of love that isn't making money.

discord bots are way better documented and have way better helptext, generally people agree to or accidentally use similar syntax because of the api constraints, etc.

every other solution I hear proposed has much worse moderator tools or is something you'll never convince someone to sign up for, or it's like matrix where common misunderstandings happen because half the clients impliment threading and the other half of the clients see it as bare messages in the middle of chat with no reply tag showing who it's actually aimed at.

the way to fix it is to either build something new, or make materials to onboard people to something else and then build up the groundswell for it. Discord only has this because network effect, but the reason everyone stays is because it's the least worst, and most people say "fuck no I'm not downloading another app / going to create an account on your website" when you ask them to use alternatives.

but most of these devs aren't being paid for their time. asking even more unpaid labor without trying to do the work to fix it doesn't really help anyone.

you gotta either

• help build the alternatives
• or help with the social component of getting people more willing to sign up for random sites and get One More App They Have To Remember To Check instead of just going to the discord of least resistance and lowest social friction

otherwise you're making the problem worse. The few communities I'm in that I have to use discord for have said it's their most community engagement and idea development by far, because everyone's already checking discord for other reasons.

it's also the easiest to "run the show" on.

fix even some of one of those two and you'll be closer to your goals than shitting on the gift economy using chat apps you don't want to engage with (for whatever reason, justified or no) because it's the least unpaid work.

I want the opposite of an immersion boiler. I want a coil with a handle that plugs into a box that plugs into the wall, and makes whatever I stick it in freeze into slush within two minutes

"the problem with millennials and younger is they just have too much goddamn screen time, unlike my generation that was raised by the TV"