spyderqueen:

merinnan:

datasoong47:

wormofmouth:

any and all word bans will ultimately fail because the core power of human language is its infinite creativity. even aside from the tiktok letter replacement strategy, people will simply make up a new word for the thing. they’re playing infinite unwinnable whackamole

#‘the tiktok letter replacement strategy’ bitch that’s leetspeak and it was created for that purpose to evade forum and comment filters 

Wait, was that actually the original function? I was under the impression that it was originally created as an asthetic, and only later co-opted to evade censorship?

Other way around! It was originally to avoid filters (or to avoid manual searching of names/terms - we used to use an early form of it on Trekfic Usenet to keep certain Star Trek executives from finding particular posts about them), and was then co-opted as an aesthetic.

The reason it had such strong ties to the hacking community is it was used to hide a lot of pirated software from search terms and also to mask porn.