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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

> the author wasn't even conceived when Compuserve/AOL users had to avoid using "breast cancer" and "scunthorpe".

Anil Dash is 51, two years younger than me but I'm old af.

He has written extensively of his time using AOL.

IMO there's a substantive difference between avoiding overzealous and clumsy early profanity filters, and the "unalive" phenomenon where people are being programmed to not use entirely non-profane words like "suicide" on many platforms.

All that said, I agree, it is worth a read.

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Is "breast" a profane word?

I think they are referring to early admin-controlled bl@cklist. Admins could define their own list of forbidden words, so a message could be censored or deleted if it contained that word. So if a chatroom admin wants to avoid sexual talk, they might conjure a list of words including boobs and breasts. Talk about breast cancer would be a false positive side effect.

Depends. Uncovered human or chicken?

Funnily, "breast" is already a euphemism. Originally it was "teat". And now the euphemism treadmill is moving towards "chest".

Are you sure about that? "Teat", to me, is a nipple, while "breast" is, well, the whole boob.

Breast used to be (and to some extent still is) gender neutral, think of breast plate armor etc. Similar shifts also happened in other languages where the word for the upper front torso area is euphemistically substituted to mean specifically the female breast anatomy on top of said area.

But this shift already happened in the 18th century, so today's intuition is also different.

Yeah, depending on context, it can still mean the "entire frontal upper torso chestal area" (like a chicken breast for example is not "chicken boobs"). In medical parlance though it generally refers to milk-producing female mammaries. "Teat" mentioned earlier is usually the same thing in non-human animals/veterinary context.

At least for me, it depends on whether the word is plural. "Breasts" are boobs and "the breast" is gender neutral front torso. "Breast" singular with no modifier could be anything depending on what pops into mind first (like "chicken breast").

It’s bizarre to see this happening in real time. When I was a kid, things were always loosening, and the adults were scrambling to keep us contained. Now it’s going in reverse.

I must admit I never really expected this!

The breast cancer example is interesting. It isn't immediately obvious how it is materially different from algo filters, the biggest difference is the sophistication, this has been going on longer than llms, but now it's very trivial to distinguish between cunt and scunthorpe, or even kill as in "I would kill for a good job" vs " I would kill [a specific person]"

One material difference I can think of is that what is being filtered here is not necessarily a side effect, it's not like the platform wants to ban just rape threats and end up banning discussion about rape cases and rape experiences, it might be that the platforms simply benefit from discouraging all talk about negative experiences and they might benefit from associating their brand only with positive experiences which sell more ads and avoid associating brands with negative experiences.

> they might benefit from associating their brand only with positive experiences which sell more ads and avoid associating brands with negative experiences.

Advertising is surely a big part of this situation.

I'm not a "content creator" but as I understand it, nobody is afraid they will get banned from these platforms for using these trigger words, they avoid using the words because they are afraid their content will be demonetized to delink it from advertisements.

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