Mentions of the term “simp” across Twitch chat doubled following its ban | Hacker News Reader

Mentions of the term “simp” across Twitch chat doubled following its ban

streamhatchet.com

19 pointsffpip19 comments

There seems to be this large segment of the population who are utterly blind to the basic human psychological fact, that the people who they want to control with measures like this are the exact same people who will rebel harder against those measures.

Banning the word simp makes the word simp even funnier. Deciding that random things and certain language are 'problematic' and declaring undesirable thoughts as 'problematic' has the exact same effect. Banning drugs has made drugs more desirable, raising the smoking age makes smoking cooler. Calling trump a nazi and saying that the UK leaving the EU is xenophobic did nothing but strengthen peoples opinions.

It's the same behaviour from the same people, from banning words to polarising politics, that fails over and over and over again and they still fail to see it.

I share your sentiment in opposing such efforts, but I think they're actually highly effective. Right-wing populism would have done much better were it not for the extreme censorship deployed against it. Most people have never even heard the best arguments for right-wing positions because they are so actively suppressed.

I'm very skeptical the censorship is working. Censorship has created a whole class of "intellectual" that is using alternative platforms (e.g Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin) to espouse their points of view.

Those podcasters have enormous platforms and the censorship on the left makes it look like these people are providing a sort of intellectual forbidden fruit. People like the Weinstein brothers commonly point to cases of how the media and tech shut down real news and science and then use that to try to advance their own politics.

Why doesn't calling Hitler a Nazi make actual Nazizm more popular? Would you argue that all the Allied propaganda during the war was actually counter productive?

Considering Hitlers supporters were proud nazis.. I think this argument has failed to serve your needs. Feel free to try again later.

I mean, doctors have been telling people not to smoke for sixty years and smoking rates have certainly declined over that period so I don't think this is universally the case.

This is so weird considering simp describes a specific behaviour that thrives on twitch. It's not a meaningless insult. I completely expect a new name will catch on soon for the same thing and people will use that instead.

Makes me wonder if it would've been more effective to do something like "messages containing the word 'simp' appear with an additional 800 ms of latency." That way subtle selection pressure would just make it less common - e.g. your message appears later and people have less time to reply to it. But, the latency would be subtle enough that nobody would notice or be able to prove it was happening. Would there be a gradual decline in word use?

Both the streisand effect and the euphemism treadmill in action here.

The euphemism treadmill? I thought "simp" started out as an insult?

Well, sometimes the treadmill goes in reverse.

It did. Its definetely not this anyway, simp is not socially unacceptable, twitch is just trying to protect the streams and donations of female content creators I assume. If new terms are made they will be twitch only

> twitch is just trying to protect the streams and donations of female content creators

I don't know a lot about twitch, but are you telling me that the content creators can't throw bans at people in their streams? That "Twitch" has to authorize this globally? That seems like a really bad idea.

I would have thought that Twitch would simply track who gets banned in individual channels and then apply global bans to the idiots who get banned across multiple channels or multiple times.

Streamers can ban whoever they want. As can their delegated mods.

Streamers can ban anyone, yes. I'm not trying to justify this, I think it's stupid and pointless and mostly just twitch virtue signaling.

They mentioned that "virgin" and "incel" had already been banned, so people need to find a new word to hurl at each other.

In some circles it is used as a badge of honor, or self-identification. Does Twitch's ban also extend to how people identify themselves?

Twitch IS the ultimate simp and just didn't want to be AMOGed. Basic psychology !

Does anyone aggregate lists of banned words on various services? I'm not even entirely sure why I'm curious, other than it seems like the differences would say something about the respective communities.

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