Algospeak Quotes

“In this era of information overload, influencers are turning to the same floor-holding strategies we use to entertain toddlers.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“Emphatic prosody is incredible for floor holding. Our brains like to be completely absorbed in an experience, and the lullaby-esque, lilting tones of the influencer accent scratch that itch while simultaneously enveloping us in a loop of engagement tactics.[2] Now that every other word is emphasized, we’re drawn in multiple times in each sentence. If your attention starts drifting, the added stress pulls you right back, making it harder to break away and easier to personally resonate with a video. Meanwhile, the vowel lengthening and overemphasis of the r sound are also textbook retention strategies because they keep us hanging on the elongated word. If you look at a children’s show like Sesame Street, you’ll see the exact same thing happening. The characters will frequently lengthen their vowels, not only to make it easier for kids to understand them, but also to continuously recapture their young audience’s attention. Hi, kiiids! Today we’re learning the alphabeeet! In this era of information overload, influencers are turning to the same floor-holding strategies we use to entertain toddlers.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“In 2022, The New York Times reported that American Sign Language (ASL) was rapidly changing to adapt to the structure of social media. The word for “dog,” for example, is traditionally made by tapping one hand onto your waist, but that specific gesture doesn’t make as much sense in the age of vertical video, where it would appear off-screen. Instead, social media users have taken to signing the letters DG twice, which also looks as if you were snapping for a dog’s attention. Although this confuses some older members of the Deaf community, younger members have adapted to their environment by modifying their communication accordingly. Just as with spoken language, smartphones have also revolutionized ASL. Since you often need to hold your camera with one hand while you communicate with the other, many Deaf people have adapted to make signs with one hand even when they’re typically made with both.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“In a 2004 Wired article identifying the concept, the author Chris Anderson contrasts Amazon with traditional booksellers like Barnes & Noble. While the average brick-and-mortar bookstore carries 130,000 highly popular titles, Amazon’s catalog in 2004 already had millions, making the majority of its sales outside those 130,000 best-selling books. It was able to do that by stocking up on content for niche audiences and pushing that content to those audiences through personalized recommendations. Short-form video apps are doing the exact same thing with their identity-tailored products. The only difference is that the new apps are going so far as to create and build the identities they cater to.[3]”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“The modern sense of the suffix can be traced back to a single word, “hardcore,” which described a genre of 1970s punk music that was “hard to the core.” From there, “-core” was clipped off and applied to other music genres like “emocore,” “speedcore,” and “gloomcore,” occasionally extending to the visual aesthetics that accompanied those categories. It wasn’t until early 2020, however, when the explosion of “-cores” really began. The vast majority of the 150 aesthetics—including absurd subgenres like monkeycore, captchacore, and plaguecore—didn’t exist in a meaningful sense before the rise of short-form video platforms. That’s not a coincidence: Terms such as “cottagecore” and “Barbiecore” now serve the same function as the words “etymology” and “linguistics” in my blog description.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“My rule of thumb for online slang is that if a word doesn’t come from 4chan, it’s probably from AAE, and it’s shocking how frequently that holds true. Starting with Vine, the words “bae,” “fleek,” and “fam” all went from specific AAE origins to being called “Gen Z slang” or “internet slang.” On modern platforms, this has only accelerated. Whenever we accuse someone of “speaking like TikTok,” we’re usually talking about specific grammatical constructions like “not you,” “it’s giving,” and “the way you X”—all of which trace back to African American English, and all of which were adopted because they felt “cool.” The same is true for a wide range of up-and-coming vocabulary words, including “cap,” “sis,” “bruh,” and “bussin.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“Incels themselves often introduce serious topics as jokes, which can normalize their idea until it is revealed in its entirety. You start out laughing at how funny a “walkpilled cardiomaxxer” meme is, and then all of a sudden your For You page is dominated by incel memes, bringing you closer to the ideology. You can see this in how their language has spread. I think it’s pretty clear that the word “Chad” started out as a humorous archetype, but at a certain point incels began using it as a genuine classification to parallel the “beta” and “incel” social tiers. Then those tiers appeared so ridiculous to outsiders that they were able to spread as memes beyond their serious usage. Now we have people using the “Chad” and “virgin” characters as if they were stock characters in a new commedia dell’arte. Poe’s law has created a dangerous game of hopscotch. We’re jumping between irony and reality, but we’re not always sure where those lines are. Interpreting words comedically helps the algorithm spread them as memes and trends, but then interpreting them seriously manifests their negative effects.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“In a 2022 paper, the Canadian sociologist Michael Halpin argues that incels intentionally establish their “subordinate masculine status” as a justification for their misogynistic views. By using their truecel purity to legitimize the blackpill philosophy, incels are able to argue against women’s agency by advocating for male supremacy, rape, and “sexual redistribution” policies allocating at least one woman to every man.[1] To the incel, these options are more humane than his own existence: The Incels Wiki page explicitly argues that “involuntary celibacy is more painful for men than rape is for women.”[”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“In economics and data science, there’s an adage called Goodhart’s law, which warns that “as soon as a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.” By optimizing for engagement to keep viewers online, social media platforms turned engagement into a target, eventually resulting in engagement-maximizing content that nobody actually wanted.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“a 2022 study showed that politicians are engaging in greater online incivility than before because civil content garners less engagement.[6] That’s a fairly worrisome development in our already polarized political climate.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“Words can also get entrenched when popularized by new technology. “Hello” wasn’t a popular interjection before the advent of the telephone, but simply happened to be a trending fad greeting when phones were being implemented throughout the country. Because it was the right word at the right time, “hello” became standardized as the word to say when answering a call, which is why we still say it today. In the same way, “unalive” simply happened to be a trending meme right around the time when early TikTok users needed a new way to say “kill.” Its adoption was an emergent effect of a human need, an existing trend, and a particular technological moment, but then it got grandfathered into the algospeak sociolect. Today, it’s the expected way to speak online, just as “hello” became the expected way to speak on the phone. As we’ve seen, both words eventually also began to escape those contexts.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“In September 2024, an employee of MrBeast—the world’s most successful YouTuber—leaked a thirty-six-page onboarding memo revealing the strategies he uses to consistently go viral. The memo shows that his success is anything but coincidence: Throughout the document, he meticulously breaks down his creative decisions into extremely analytical explanations of how everything is engineered to improve his retention rate.[4] This invaluable insight into MrBeast’s headspace proves that creators at the top level must be deliberate in order to keep succeeding. It’s not about quality so much as it is about attention: In his own words, “99% of movies or tv shows would flop on YouTube” because they’re not as good at engaging the audience. He treats YouTube as a unique medium and strongly believes that “the more extreme [a video is] the better.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“As the largest English-speaking country by far, America also boasts a massive plurality of English-language social media users, who expect content to conform to their cultural expectations. Fully 43 percent of my Instagram Reels viewers are from the United States, which is an enormous difference when compared with the U.K. in second place with 7 percent. The differences are even more stark on YouTube and TikTok. The knowledge gleaned from this data sends me a clear message as a creator: I primarily need to cater to an American audience. Influencers are constantly pressured by social media to gravitate toward their mean audience, for it both avoids stigmatization and generates the most consistent interaction. This is easy for me as an American, but many international creators feel as if they have to “soften” their accents to sound more American and thus appeal to their target demographic. And of course, every time someone conforms, it becomes more and more expected for others to do the same. In effect, we’ve launched an inexorable, performative genericization of the English language, which may even be having real effects on how people speak offline. In 2020, The Guardian reported that British children were increasingly speaking in American-sounding “YouTube accents” during the pandemic due to the predominantly American content they consumed online.[1] A”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“It’s a zero-sum game against every other creator on the app, and success can come down to the smallest details. Each additional attention-grabbing strategy exponentially contributes to a video’s success. At a certain point, videos are recommended simply because they capture our attention. This is an online manifestation of a behavioral phenomenon called the Matthew effect: Essentially, content that is slightly better at capturing your attention will perform exponentially better on social media. Part of this is a normal mathematical principle of virality. If a post is shared 20 percent less, it’s going to be seen not by 20 percent fewer people but by 90 percent fewer, because fewer people will even be given the chance to share it in the first place.[6] On video platforms, this 20 percent difference determines whether a video gets a hundred thousand or a million views, and that’s before we consider human behavior in information cascades. People on social media observe the choices made by those before them and then react to that. If a video has no views or likes, you’re more likely to scroll by, even if it’s an excellent video, simply because you see it’s not getting much engagement and assume it’s bad.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“The massive success of the personalized recommendation algorithm relies on a few tricks, but the underlying principle is quite intuitive: If you like a certain kind of content, you’ll probably like other content similar to it. For instance, I recently liked a video of a man singing “Barbie World” by Nicki Minaj to the grave of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The algorithm correctly inferred that I enjoyed the song and sent me more funny “Barbie World” videos, which improved my experience on the app. It also probably pushed those videos to people who fit the same demographic profile as me, since they’re also likely to respond positively. When these songs accompany a meme or dance that people want to re-create, a trend is born. At its core, this process is the same as those on Vine and Musical.ly, just spread through a more sophisticated recommendation system. The videos are now especially compelling because they make it seem as if everyone were hopping onto a trend (a perception exacerbated by your biased recommendation feed). Because we’re social creatures, your recommendation page will pressure you to watch or participate in these trends, so you can feel caught up on the latest cultural references.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“This acceleration was directly aided by the rise of print media. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, there was an American slang fad to give words incorrect abbreviations, like “O.K.” for “all correct.” That was then printed in a Boston newspaper, helping it reach mainstream usage, which is how we have the word “okay” today.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“Many creators are already afraid to use their community’s vocabulary because of the perception that the algorithm is working against them. TikTok in particular lost a lot of trust due to occasional “glitches” like the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag showing up with zero views[6] or the exposés showing how it prevented undesirable creators from showing up on the For You page. Reading between the lines, these creators choose to find algospeak replacements instead of using their own language. This is an incredibly relevant concern in the LGBTQ+ space. Beyond mass-reporting trolls and built-in bias politicizing queer identity, the community has to contend with direct geographic suppression. TikTok has openly admitted to censoring hashtags like #gay and #trans in conservative regions like Russia and the Middle East,[7] so, again, there’s been ample reason to be suspicious of the platform. Murky or incomplete feedback only worsens the issue. Several American trans creators have complained about being banned without explanation—contributing to the justifiable paranoia even if their incidents had valid but uncited rationale. As a result, many queer creators feel they must resort to algospeak to best express their identity. You’ll see people use the word “zesty” or the emoji as a metonym for “gay.” In other instances, they’ve replaced the term “LGBTQ+” with phrases like “leg booty” or “alphabet mafia.” The most famous example in the early 2020s was probably “le$bian” for “lesbian.” While this might seem like a typical grawlix substitution, TikTok’s text-to-speech function clearly didn’t understand that, and would instead read the phrase aloud as “le dollar bean.” This pronunciation was so wholly embraced by the online lesbian community that many creators started saying it out loud themselves.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“Emojis are just one of many ways that people self-bowdlerize naughty terms. You’ll still come across sex educators spelling the word “sex” as “s*x” or “s3x,” but the most frequently used alternative in the early 2020s didn’t involve a creative substitution or respelling. Instead, it introduced an entirely new sound sequence by modifying the k sound to a g sound. I’m talking, of course, about the word “seggs,” wholeheartedly embraced by creators in the infancy of TikTok. The hashtag #seggs has been used in more than 100,000 posts, #seggseducation shows up in more than 40,000 informative videos, and I’ve also heard my friends ironically use “seggs” offline. Rather than just respelling the word to something immediately phonetic like “secks,” people chose to make the word sound a little sillier, which is a very common pattern on social media. There’s also “nip nops” for “nipples”; “peen” for “penis”; and “kermit sewerslide” for “commit suicide.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“Internally, we might feel as though the narratives help us categorize our individuality, but on paper they all rely on the same stories. It doesn’t matter how much I label myself: If I’m a demisexual goblincore Gen Z Swiftie, I guarantee there are still others like me. The only thing those labels really change about me is that they make me easier to classify and market to. Ironically, true individuality may come out of a lack of labels and stories, because there’s greater freedom of expression with a blank slate. If everybody’s the “main character,” then nobody is.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“This is is why so many algospeak euphemisms are specific to the online domain of use. Words like “sewerslide” and “seggs” are understood as shared vernacular in the algospace. To use them is to recognize that they are pieces of the social media sociolect and culture. The “brainrot” genre, especially,
relies on shared folklore. Each word is only funny when it refers back to the running history of other brainrot words. Memes are necessarily understood in the context of other memes; terms like “skibidi” are popularized as postironic nods to the very culture that spawned the overuse of niche comedic references.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

“Memes have always been kind of like a virus. Whenever you learn a new word, you can think of it as coming into contact with a parasite. Either your guard is up and you reject the word, or it breaks through your defenses and you become a “host,” using and replicating the word for it to reach a larger population. Then there’s the uncanny similarity between how we talk about the ways that words and diseases spread: We say they move through social networks in a “viral” manner, hence the phrase “gone viral.” Many linguists even use epidemiological models to show the spread or lifespan of ideas.”
― Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language