Nice to see Newgrounds is still alive and more or less unchanged since its early days. With so many of the creative spaces online becoming highly censored hellholes, having a more laissez-faire platform is a breath of fresh air.
One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes. There is a certain romanticism about being anti-establishment, but then they became the establishment and couldn’t figure out what to do next.
I think you're blaming the wrong people. Most of the censorship I've seen is coming from ad funded platforms wanting to please corporations. Independent artists create all kinds of offensive content.
Unless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.
No doubt the platforms are a problem too, but I was referring to the creatives themselves. Just a few examples I can remember.
In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
TV self-censored for years. Elvis was unfit for family viewing. Punks wouldn’t share stages with racists and ejected National Front supporters from gigs. Rock against Racism was founded partly in response to Eric Clapton’s pro-Enoch Powell racist remarks. Dead Kennedeys were not exactly coy about where they drew the line.
If you want medical analogies for COVID, AIDS disinformation is perfect. ACT UP and similar AIDS movements would have laughed you out of creative spaces for bringing misinformation about how AIDS was spread.
If you have ChatGPT tokens going spare, you can ask it for a balanced view of historical artistic deplatforming and self-censoring. I asked mine and, in classic one-liner machine-slop dunk, it said…
“The argument sounds like it is being made by someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book, or someone over 40 who missed the world around them. Ask them which they are.”
Elvis wasn't the one calling for censorship. It was religious viewers - the audience.
I'm not denying that there were examples of creatives - like punks - who called for censorship. I'm describing a massive shift in scale and scope.
I did as you suggested because it's important to have a broad and balanced view of the issues. I used the query "Do you believe the scale and scope of creatives calling for censorship is worse, better, or the same today as it was 50 years ago? Provide a detailed response but summarise with one sentence at the end." I used Sol 5.6 Extra High (I'm deliberately avoiding Sol 6 right now due to some issues with hallucinations). I have a system prompt which emphasises accuracy and citations over speed.
I won't paste the entire passage (Hacker News bans and/or rate limits accounts which do that), but I will paste the summary. Note that I've read the analysis in full, and while I am more informed now, it has not changed my opinion.
> "On the specific question of creatives themselves calling for lawful expression to be suppressed, removed or deplatformed, I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago, although formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then."
Feel free to ask your research model the same question. I would encourage you to use a better paid model with careful system prompt, direction, and effort. Your model sounds like a petulant teenager.
““use a better paid model” as an argument from authority is magnificent. We’ve somehow reinvented “my dad can beat up your dad,” except our dads are inference-time budgets”.
So there’s that.
Getting back to human responses; it’s hard to argue your robot’s conclusion when it only got to a weak “probably” while comparing the communication environments of 1980’s (no social media) and 2026 (very much social media). Lots more people with lots bigger platforms dealing with lots more voices on what should/shouldn’t be tolerated -> perceived increase in volume of censorship by both audience and other creatives (themselves taking role of both audience and performer playing to their own audience)
Elvis may not have been calling to censor himself, but the hosts and producers (themselves creatives) followed the demands of the audience - surely at least a somewhat close analogy to creatives amplifying the voices of their audiences today?
To get a bit better than your model’s “probably”, maybe we should shoot for specifics. If we agree there was a “dark past” where government and religious pressure created artistic censorship to comparable levels to today, and if I concede to move the argument forward that we’re in “historical decline” now. Where specifically do you put the beginning and end of the “golden age”?
The dark past could of course overlap with the start of the subsequent decline, creating not a golden age but a shit age, centered maybe on the late 80s.
It seems entirely disingenuous to tell me to investigate this in earnest and ask ChatGPT for answers, then dismiss it when it didn't give you the answer you wanted. I gave you the model, the effort level, the query, and the summary, which you could use to confirm what I write. I note that you haven't tested this yourself - ostensibly because you know it will return something similar. Further, you either didn't read my comments or are attempting to straw man them, because I have not stated nor argued that religious and government censorship is equivalent today. I also find the implication in your final question absurd. There is no way to place chronological boxes around cultural change. They are not binary, and I do not believe you think they are.
Your comment is dishonesty wrapped in condescension, and it's clear that you never intended to have any kind of earnest discussion here.
Of all the replies I was expecting from you, this wasn’t on my betting slip.
There’s no condescension here; you had one key thesis I objected to (and, incidentally, were the first to invoke a robot war!)
> I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
My argument is - it did “used to be this way”. Your proxy, as best as I can tell, agreed.
> formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then.
And your courageous avatar made a weak (e.g. the word probably, not provably and “I think” not “I showed”) supportive claim (I cannot see the reams of research behind the conclusion).
> I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago
I said, ok, let’s take that at face - where do you feel the transition happend, and posited reasons why the transition may seem stronger (social media).
Now you’re unwilling to argue specifics and off dismissing my sincerity. Adult argument fully abandoned, feelings abound!
So neither of us will learn anything useful today. I’ll never find out specifically when you believe our slippery slope began, and you’ll never explore whether reality matches your thinking. Let’s hope the data centers that powered your race to self-confirmation were running on solar, so at least the environment was spared!
In the hope of rescuing some thread.
> There is no way to place chronological boxes around cultural change.
This is not only demonstrably false, it also turns your initial thesis “it didn’t used to be like this” into a farce. You were the first to claim there was some time boxing we could apply!
It also, candidly, reinforces the first conclusion robo-me reached. “ someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book”. My robot gave me 10,000 examples of books on the study and findings of historians researching the evolution of cultural norms over time. It is very much a thing. I very much believe in it sincerely as a valuable discipline.
If you really want to argue that nobody can say Victorian social norms evolved, and were arguably most harmed by the First World War. Or that the gender and sexual attitudes of the post-second-world-war were pushed to breaking point during a period known as the “swinging sixties”. Or that the introduction of social media and camera phones to the schoolyard caused a dramatic change in kids’ behaviors. Then I think you’re being a special kind of Saturday obstinate.
But if you are actually trying to discuss rather than play-fight, try answering the question - when specifically do you think that the decline began, such that we are no longer living in the rose-tinted era where things “used to be”?
And dude, you can back your claim down or add nuance to it - “creatives censor in a different way in the internet era to how the censored in the TV era” is a defensible claim, I’ll even let you have “the nature of what is censored now has changed”. You’re just not getting away with a demonstrably false “there’s more censorship now”.
Bill Lawrence removed episodes because he and the cast hated that for years after they'd see people at halloween dressing as the characters in blackface, and realised that people were taking the wrong message from the episodes they'd made which were meant to mock the idea of people thinking it was OK to do blackface.
That isn't self-censorship, it's accepting that your work didn't read the way you wanted it to and deciding it's not worth having it out there under your name any more.
Freedom of speech also includes the freedom not to speak, and people should be allowed to say "I don't like this work of mine any more, I'm not continuing to publish it". If you advocate for enforced speech, you are the censor, just using a different tool.
> That isn't self-censorship, it's accepting that your work didn't read the way you wanted it to and deciding it's not worth having it out there under your name any more.
You are confused about the definition of the word censor:
> [to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/censor)
I understand Lawrence has reasons for his calls for censorship. All censorious people have reasons for their demands. They are still calls for censorship. Lawrence is free to not speak. He's even free to demand that media be censored. No one has argued otherwise.
I'm aware of the definition of censorship, but the context is you saying:
> One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes.
This is not the same as a dictionary definition of censorship generally.
Presenting people changing their views over time as they learn as some evidence of some new trend of "censorship-hungry prudes" is silly. It's hysteria and a false narrative trying to paint something normal and healthy as equivalent to something dangerous.
The much bigger media preservation issue is actually represented by Scrubs: the fact that all the streaming services now have the show with all the music cut out and replaced with generic royalty-free stuff because the licenses ran out.
In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
Maybe just nostalgia talking, but the height of Newgrounds really seemed like a golden age for light gaming. The shift to mobile games has just resulted in a large number of gambling simulators, which I'm sure has been a key reason for the popularity of Kalshi, Polymarket, etc.
That seems a reach to say the popularity of kalshi and polymarket is down to gambling simulators.
Id wager (heh) that it's much more down to a lack of regulation combined with the normalisation of influencer driven get rich quick but pretend it's clever investing that exploded in popularity with crypto and wallstreetbets style influencer investing. Combine that with house prices being where they are and people get risky with investing as their hope outstrips their caution.
I don't think a few rounds of balatro or slotomania leads to that.
The crazy thing is there was a period between Newgrounds games and mobile games: Facebook games. It was so popular at that moment and so insignificant hindsight that we barely remember it.
that's quite a reach. much more notably, the shift to mobile games has resulted in predatory pay2win "micro"transactions and ads everywhere. the last time I'd tried to find something new to play on the shitter, seemingly every random game I'd got from the playstore wanted an AAA's $ to unlock features and/or was full of ads. and they weren't even those coomer bait gachas everyone with half a brain knows to avoid.
i dont think its the sites. people always blame the sites. but people became lazy and hungry for dopamine. they arent creating cool stuff anymore but almost get upset or withdrawl if someone else dont shove something 'new and exciting' down their throats
internet is not the only thin that suffers it. TV, music, its the same. Listen to what kids played music ,movies, toys etc. in 60, 70, 80, 90s up to today. you will see very sharp changes, first in how they occupy themselves and then in how they shape society -_- for their kids to go into the next dumbing down cycle.
(yes v cynical and black n white put. easier to word)
I remember playing a crap web game in college, kinda like gunslinger, where you try to shoot people who turn around with a gun (and not those without). When I graduated college, Ian--one of my good friends at work--ended up being one of those guys in the game! Turns out that game I was playing was built by Tom Fulp, and he was using his friends (like Ian) as characters in his games pre-Newgrounds. All that messing around with crap games on the internet paid off. He had started Newgrounds while in college, and had quit to do it.
Met Tom once, and he was a cool guy, but he didn't believe in the stuff that they taught in CS. He had a long rant about how learning string diff algorithms were useless. Anyway, it turns out later on, he went back to college to finish his degree. When his classmate(s) found out who he was, this one kid was so excited to sit next to him. "Do you know who he is?!" he would exclaim to his professor, to Tom's embarrassment. I wonder if he had to do string diff algos when he went back to finish college.
I don't know man. Being able to reason about DS&A was pretty useful before the advent of LLMs. If only to pass the interviews at Google/Facebook (when they were in their prime circa 2006-2016).
I worked at bigcorp for half a decade before all of the LLM stuff and there was exactly one time I really had to give a shit about algorithmic complexity in that entire tenure. Obviously some developers needed to care more than others, but the vast, vast majority of work and roles just didn’t really need to care about this. 9 times out of 10 you’re using the off the shelf library that already has the optimized bubble sort of whatever for your job
How often you have to take algorithmic complexity into account depends on what level of the stack you're at, but even at the application level, I think understanding algorithmic complexity is still important.
I was working at Company X around 2013, and we had a Rails ecommerce site. Trivial in the algorithmic sense. Had a contractor that pushed a change that somehow made everything crawl. When we did profiling together, it turned out he had written an O(n^2) algorithm when looking up country codes or something. Sometimes, there's no off-the-shelf library, and it's the minimum a dev should know not to do.
I'm not saying it should be a maniacal focus, but it should be taken into account. Of course, it's with judgement. We get shittier and shittier software if it's not taken into account at all.
>I worked at bigcorp for half a decade before all of the LLM stuff and there was exactly one time I really had to give a shit about algorithmic complexity in that entire tenure.
Conversely, I've got a PhD in math, and all my tenure (whether it was bigcorp - Google, etc - or smallcorp) was about algorithms and performance where off-the-shelf library does not exist, and you can't throw compute at the problem to do it the dumb way.
Working at bigcorp for 14 years so far and I struggle to think of a single day where I didn't need to consider algorithmic complexity or efficiency. Do you not write code that fetches things from a database? Do you not need to make tradeoffs between how much data you fetch at once, which fields you load, which things you cache, whether your query joins on the db or materializes things separately, whether you lazy or eager load, whether you are doing a O(1) or O(n^2) lookup and the tradeoffs, whether you can use a db index or not, memory/latency/compute/storage tradeoffs, etc? I feel like in even a simple bigcorp SAAS you need to consider this stuff daily.
Unless you are dealing with data at true scale, and not many people are, often the imperfections are hidden because they run fast, even if they are quadratic. I'm more referring to being actually forced to sit down and write out your own algorithm in a novel way.
Of course during my BigCorp tenure I had to think about complexity all the time, but 99 times out of 100 there was an off the shelf tool available for my specific data structure and I didn't have to think about the algorithm at all beyond "oh there's a library that solves this for my specific data structure, and it's O(N)log n that will be fast enough". Whereas so much attention in interviewing traditionally was based on these "write a bubble sort algorithm from scratch" type questions which your average engineer basically never has to do on the job unless they are operating in a very high performance/scaling type of role.
yeah I bought it for Ps3 way back in the day. mindblowing seeing that on PSN when some 6 years prior I was playing it in the middle school computer lab.
I remember a specific user I used to chat with on AIM and some of his stuff I remember laughing at doesn't exist anymore, presumably copyright claimed.
It's cool to see how far Ruffle has come in making flash games playable without flash. Was able to go check out a flash game I uploaded 15 years ago on here, and it's completely playable now, when I just assumed it was gone forever. There's so much content on Newgrounds and similar sites that isn't lost to time because of it, makes me want to go spend a few hours reliving the olden days.
A Ruffle anecdote: I know websites ship Ruffle, but I've also had the Firefox extension installed for some old sites that do not. I recently had to disable it because it made Twitch claim that my browser is too old to use their website. I'm assuming they check for Flash support, and somehow that trumps everything else they use to identify the browser version. Pretty pathetic, honestly.
I agree, hilarious check. Someone realized that the set of browsers you probably don’t want to support today, and the Flash supporting browsers … the Venn diagram is actually a circle
Amazing. Literally the opposite of what you're supposed to do, which is detect individual feature support and upgrade the experience when possible, while gracefully degrading as much as possible when features aren't present.
I have a Twitch account that I can't log into due. They'll send me an e-mail with my username in it but won't send me the password reset e-mail. Their support will acknowledge that I clearly have access to the inbox and will refuse to help or do anything for me to recover my account. They are beyond worthless.
At least you can still use the chat from an IRC client and view streams in mpv. If they ruin those aspects I'll probably quit going there. I did also stream on there a bit in the past, but didn't get too attached or locked in, so mostly I care about the viewer experience still.
My bank does this, too. They also only say that the browser has "outdated components" without bothering to tell you what particular thing offended it. Maybe it's some library they both use that doesn't return the details?
Almost brings a tear to my eye to see they still have all the games and stupid Flash animations I submitted as a middle schooler, hacking around with his friends going on 25 years ago, just hoping not to get “blammed”. I’m sure these days kids are doing the same in Roblox or Minecraft or whatever - maybe it’s the same, but it feels so much more commercial than the heyday of Newgrounds. A special time to have been online for sure.
Me to I’m too embarrassed to post my username here. But I made so many little animations and games based on my dragonball z obsession. I’m sure instead of a Wacom and windows pc a new generation is doing this with a iPad and pen.
It peaked and went on a decline in the period before companies were snatching up sites just to merge their user bases.
Had newgrounds continued into the 2010's, it would've been bought by Google to boost Google Wave / Circles / Plus whatever, and then it would've been actually shutdown.
So its age is actually what helped it survive I suspect.
What a treat to see this pop up here. I used to be obsessed with Madness flash animation back in the day. Got me into Flash and web tooling in general. A testament to the prime 2000s web.
So fun to see my music (created when I was 15 years old) is still sitting there! Sadly though my flash animations (that were 'blammed'[0] almost immediately) aren't there, which I wish I could find somehow.
I used to play flash games on this site, one of my favorites was "William and Sly" and also "William and Sly 2".
You can still play them now, they ported it away from flash - which still offered experiences that we are just now beginning to match natively in terms of web gaming and video generation.
I never got to actually be on newgrounds, when I was 8 to 14 years old I didn't understand much english so I was always playing newgrounds games but off sites, it's only later that I understood that most of it was from the same community!
Newsgrounds, good memories! (I am 32, played these flash games all the time when I was a kid). There was another one, only remember the first letter: M.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 44.5 ms ] threadUnless you mean that there is less slurs and jokes against minorities, which is an improvement tbh.
In 2020 dozens of Hachette employees walked out over the publisher’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir. Hachette cancelled the book.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
If you want medical analogies for COVID, AIDS disinformation is perfect. ACT UP and similar AIDS movements would have laughed you out of creative spaces for bringing misinformation about how AIDS was spread.
If you have ChatGPT tokens going spare, you can ask it for a balanced view of historical artistic deplatforming and self-censoring. I asked mine and, in classic one-liner machine-slop dunk, it said…
“The argument sounds like it is being made by someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book, or someone over 40 who missed the world around them. Ask them which they are.”
I'm not denying that there were examples of creatives - like punks - who called for censorship. I'm describing a massive shift in scale and scope.
I did as you suggested because it's important to have a broad and balanced view of the issues. I used the query "Do you believe the scale and scope of creatives calling for censorship is worse, better, or the same today as it was 50 years ago? Provide a detailed response but summarise with one sentence at the end." I used Sol 5.6 Extra High (I'm deliberately avoiding Sol 6 right now due to some issues with hallucinations). I have a system prompt which emphasises accuracy and citations over speed.
I won't paste the entire passage (Hacker News bans and/or rate limits accounts which do that), but I will paste the summary. Note that I've read the analysis in full, and while I am more informed now, it has not changed my opinion.
> "On the specific question of creatives themselves calling for lawful expression to be suppressed, removed or deplatformed, I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago, although formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then."
Feel free to ask your research model the same question. I would encourage you to use a better paid model with careful system prompt, direction, and effort. Your model sounds like a petulant teenager.
““use a better paid model” as an argument from authority is magnificent. We’ve somehow reinvented “my dad can beat up your dad,” except our dads are inference-time budgets”.
So there’s that.
Getting back to human responses; it’s hard to argue your robot’s conclusion when it only got to a weak “probably” while comparing the communication environments of 1980’s (no social media) and 2026 (very much social media). Lots more people with lots bigger platforms dealing with lots more voices on what should/shouldn’t be tolerated -> perceived increase in volume of censorship by both audience and other creatives (themselves taking role of both audience and performer playing to their own audience)
Elvis may not have been calling to censor himself, but the hosts and producers (themselves creatives) followed the demands of the audience - surely at least a somewhat close analogy to creatives amplifying the voices of their audiences today?
To get a bit better than your model’s “probably”, maybe we should shoot for specifics. If we agree there was a “dark past” where government and religious pressure created artistic censorship to comparable levels to today, and if I concede to move the argument forward that we’re in “historical decline” now. Where specifically do you put the beginning and end of the “golden age”?
Your comment is dishonesty wrapped in condescension, and it's clear that you never intended to have any kind of earnest discussion here.
There’s no condescension here; you had one key thesis I objected to (and, incidentally, were the first to invoke a robot war!)
> I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
My argument is - it did “used to be this way”. Your proxy, as best as I can tell, agreed.
> formal government censorship was in some respects more coercive then.
And your courageous avatar made a weak (e.g. the word probably, not provably and “I think” not “I showed”) supportive claim (I cannot see the reams of research behind the conclusion).
> I think the evidence points to it being broader in scope and probably more common today than 50 years ago
I said, ok, let’s take that at face - where do you feel the transition happend, and posited reasons why the transition may seem stronger (social media).
Now you’re unwilling to argue specifics and off dismissing my sincerity. Adult argument fully abandoned, feelings abound!
So neither of us will learn anything useful today. I’ll never find out specifically when you believe our slippery slope began, and you’ll never explore whether reality matches your thinking. Let’s hope the data centers that powered your race to self-confirmation were running on solar, so at least the environment was spared!
In the hope of rescuing some thread.
> There is no way to place chronological boxes around cultural change.
This is not only demonstrably false, it also turns your initial thesis “it didn’t used to be like this” into a farce. You were the first to claim there was some time boxing we could apply!
It also, candidly, reinforces the first conclusion robo-me reached. “ someone under 40 who believes they’re living through a unique historical decline but refuses to read a book”. My robot gave me 10,000 examples of books on the study and findings of historians researching the evolution of cultural norms over time. It is very much a thing. I very much believe in it sincerely as a valuable discipline.
If you really want to argue that nobody can say Victorian social norms evolved, and were arguably most harmed by the First World War. Or that the gender and sexual attitudes of the post-second-world-war were pushed to breaking point during a period known as the “swinging sixties”. Or that the introduction of social media and camera phones to the schoolyard caused a dramatic change in kids’ behaviors. Then I think you’re being a special kind of Saturday obstinate.
But if you are actually trying to discuss rather than play-fight, try answering the question - when specifically do you think that the decline began, such that we are no longer living in the rose-tinted era where things “used to be”?
And dude, you can back your claim down or add nuance to it - “creatives censor in a different way in the internet era to how the censored in the TV era” is a defensible claim, I’ll even let you have “the nature of what is censored now has changed”. You’re just not getting away with a demonstrably false “there’s more censorship now”.
Cool, I asked my computer mommy and got about 200,000 examples of creatives demanding less censorship
That isn't self-censorship, it's accepting that your work didn't read the way you wanted it to and deciding it's not worth having it out there under your name any more.
Freedom of speech also includes the freedom not to speak, and people should be allowed to say "I don't like this work of mine any more, I'm not continuing to publish it". If you advocate for enforced speech, you are the censor, just using a different tool.
You are confused about the definition of the word censor:
> [to prevent part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/censor)
I understand Lawrence has reasons for his calls for censorship. All censorious people have reasons for their demands. They are still calls for censorship. Lawrence is free to not speak. He's even free to demand that media be censored. No one has argued otherwise.
> One of the worst cultural developments of this century has been creative people becoming censorship-hungry prudes.
This is not the same as a dictionary definition of censorship generally.
Presenting people changing their views over time as they learn as some evidence of some new trend of "censorship-hungry prudes" is silly. It's hysteria and a false narrative trying to paint something normal and healthy as equivalent to something dangerous.
The much bigger media preservation issue is actually represented by Scrubs: the fact that all the streaming services now have the show with all the music cut out and replaced with generic royalty-free stuff because the licenses ran out.
Tina Fey asked NBC to remove 30 Rock episodes from all distribution.
Bill Lawrence (creator of Scrubs), asked to have episodes removed.
John Ridley (Oscar winning screen writer) asked HBO to remove Gone with the Wind.
Neil Young threatened to leave Spotify if they didn’t remove Joe Rogan.
The 2020 “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign which included Sacha Baron Cohen, Katy Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, and MANY more, demanded platforms and distributors and channels remove content ranging from political ads to discussions of COVID.
I just asked ChatGPT and got about 10,000 examples of famous creatives demanding censorship. It didn’t used to be this way.
And I am saddened to this day that no one I've worked with professionally has gotten the reference. One day.
https://fat-pie.com/
Id wager (heh) that it's much more down to a lack of regulation combined with the normalisation of influencer driven get rich quick but pretend it's clever investing that exploded in popularity with crypto and wallstreetbets style influencer investing. Combine that with house prices being where they are and people get risky with investing as their hope outstrips their caution.
I don't think a few rounds of balatro or slotomania leads to that.
The games were more polished by the time, but still quite wild.
internet is not the only thin that suffers it. TV, music, its the same. Listen to what kids played music ,movies, toys etc. in 60, 70, 80, 90s up to today. you will see very sharp changes, first in how they occupy themselves and then in how they shape society -_- for their kids to go into the next dumbing down cycle.
(yes v cynical and black n white put. easier to word)
Met Tom once, and he was a cool guy, but he didn't believe in the stuff that they taught in CS. He had a long rant about how learning string diff algorithms were useless. Anyway, it turns out later on, he went back to college to finish his degree. When his classmate(s) found out who he was, this one kid was so excited to sit next to him. "Do you know who he is?!" he would exclaim to his professor, to Tom's embarrassment. I wonder if he had to do string diff algos when he went back to finish college.
I was working at Company X around 2013, and we had a Rails ecommerce site. Trivial in the algorithmic sense. Had a contractor that pushed a change that somehow made everything crawl. When we did profiling together, it turned out he had written an O(n^2) algorithm when looking up country codes or something. Sometimes, there's no off-the-shelf library, and it's the minimum a dev should know not to do.
I'm not saying it should be a maniacal focus, but it should be taken into account. Of course, it's with judgement. We get shittier and shittier software if it's not taken into account at all.
Conversely, I've got a PhD in math, and all my tenure (whether it was bigcorp - Google, etc - or smallcorp) was about algorithms and performance where off-the-shelf library does not exist, and you can't throw compute at the problem to do it the dumb way.
To each their own.
Of course during my BigCorp tenure I had to think about complexity all the time, but 99 times out of 100 there was an off the shelf tool available for my specific data structure and I didn't have to think about the algorithm at all beyond "oh there's a library that solves this for my specific data structure, and it's O(N)log n that will be fast enough". Whereas so much attention in interviewing traditionally was based on these "write a bubble sort algorithm from scratch" type questions which your average engineer basically never has to do on the job unless they are operating in a very high performance/scaling type of role.
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/301341
Even the same old games are still there
The money people probably just told them "more ads. I don't care how you do it - more ads"
I bet it's only because they forgot they had such a feature. Like RSS feeds on Reddit.
Or maybe I'm just not paying attention...
Had newgrounds continued into the 2010's, it would've been bought by Google to boost Google Wave / Circles / Plus whatever, and then it would've been actually shutdown.
So its age is actually what helped it survive I suspect.
I really wish that will never happen. For now it produces crappy clones of existing games
[0] - https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/599831
You can still play them now, they ported it away from flash - which still offered experiences that we are just now beginning to match natively in terms of web gaming and video generation.
Looking up my user, kind of embarrassing to see comments from 22 years ago asking and giving code advice.
However, it does raise lots of nostalgia for the BBS era.