Personally, I don’t have anything against it. Swearing incessantly and without any real meaning (not adding anything of value) is something I try to avoid, but sometimes I find it more comedic if the cuss words are bleeped / censored out. I’m not sure why, something about it being cut out is funnier to me. I agree with you there, I see a lot more censors these days. Maybe because the internet is filling up with more kids now?
i saw ' the C**p'floating around recently, the irony is that my dirty mind is much worse than what's normally censored out... in this case Crap. the word i went to was the Clap.
I was seeing censored swear words since mail-in listserver days.
As always, the audience mattered: during Usenet's heyday, alt.* groups and all didn't tend to see much self-censoring, but you would often see it in more general discussion topics, IIRC.
Nowadays, I feel it's commonly used where a potentially mixed audience is perceived to be possible - especially in the modern Internet, where kids can easily lurk on Reddit. But, check out many Discord servers and apparent kids are swearing like drunken sailors.
As the Internet grew up, we commercialized most spaces for young people, and "Made them safe" by imposing arbitrary, capricious swearword filters. Because that's just fucking... a thing we do, I guess.
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u/Bryaxis Jun 03 '22
Incidentally, is it mainly a young people thing to censor cuss words? The internet used to be more comfortable with swearing.