unalive may be new, but by now it's just a synonym for suicide. sure, older people or people who are less online might not know it, but that's how language works. but in the end, suicide and unaliving both mean to kill oneself.
grape on the other hand is 100% just a way to censor the word, especially because that allows people to just use a grape-emoji to ensure that people know what they mean. could be that this escapes the online word as well, as it sounds "cute", making the act of talking about this subject a bit more palatable, maybe.
i get the point of the article, but it's a bit of a circlejerk to me - "huzzah, stop minding the algorithm, talk as you wish!". well yeah...but people started using these words because they couldn't use the original words, on these platforms. and now they're used to it. seems a bit "old man telling at clouds because other words are being used now".
i 100% resonate with the points about the billionaire-class being involved in language and causing people to talk differently, but that's not exclusive to online platforms. always has been, unfortunately. (can't mention the word socialism or communism when talking to people, explain the same rhetoric without using these words and suddenly everything is fine, to name one example).
should we go back to calling people ret##### fag####, was that censorship as well? or does language evolve and tolerances for certain words change?
i really don't get the fuss about 'unalive', the more i think about it. so 'suicide' is the word we should use, not 'unalive'. is 'killing oneself' okay? what about 'self-murder', 'ending it all', 'self-destruction'? are those okay because they're older synonyms? should we overall stop using synonyms which were created to make something sound less horrific (which humans do a lot). should we still talk about master/slave in IT?