@sedewt Sorry to pull this from the replies but I figured I should clarify for everyone: Basically, people on tiktok have a habit of censoring specific "bad" words in their video captions bcs of a(possibly incorrect) belief that the site's algorithm will punish videos with those words. People will say "unalive" instead of "kill", for instance, but also they will use replacements like "seggs" for sex, l3$bi4n instead of lesbian, that sort of thing.
Regardless of the truth of the algorithm's programming, this behavior has become so ingrained that it is spreading to other websites, and here on tumblr censoring words like that means that people who have certain things blacklisted cannot reliably avoid content they find upsetting. Like as an example, body horror and gore are legit triggers for me, so I have those tags blacklisted. But, if someone decided to post some body horror art, and, to avoid upsetting the algorithm, tagged it as "b0dy h0rr0r" I would still see the post, bcs there's no possible way for me to have every single variation on "body horror" blacklisted.
In addition to that, people who enjoy body horror and gore WON'T be able to find that art, bcs they likely are following the "body horror" and "gore" tags, and posts with mangled tags won't show up in their feed or searches, and they don't have the time to search every variation on the tag to find the content they like.
As a further example, since I know people on Twitter will misspell "commissions" bcs they think the algorithm suppresses posts asking for money, if you do that here someone looking for an artist to commission by searching for "commissions" won't be able to find your info!! Or, on the tagging side, people with photosensitivities need to be able to blacklist "eyestrain" and "flashing lights", and so if you tag something "3y3str4in" they will still see it and potentially have their health conditions triggered.
So when tagging stuff, both for people who need stuff blacklisted and people who want to find your content, you should ALWAYS tag posts with the full, actual words. There's also no real algorithm here and the one that we do have, as far as I know, doesn't give a shit if you say kill or fuck or whatever. You're just making everything harder for yourself AND others for literally no benefit at all.
The only instance where you can, and are expected to, censor your tags is if you're posting salt/hate. Like if I wanted to complain about say, idk Sasuke and Naruto as a ship, I would use a tag like "sasu//naru" instead of "sasunaru" or "n4rut0" instead of "naruto" so that my post doesn't show up in the main tag, bcs it's kinda rude to flood tags with negativity like that. I would also censor the words in my post to avoid them showing up in searches in general, or use a readmore to hide the body of the post so people have to click through to read it.
That is the ONLY time it is acceptable to censor words. The rest of the time you should always just spell out words, especially "bad" ones, bcs people can't avoid upsetting content if they can't filter it reliably. If you're worried about the "algorithm" punishing you or people seeing your post who don't want to, one, stop caring about the algorithm most of us never interact with it anyway, and two, in addition to full tags being the best for blacklists, we also have community labels for several types of mature content, so use those to your heart's content, bcs people can filter stuff with those warnings too.
TL;DR: Censoring tags like people do on tiktok breaks the website and makes everything suck for everyone, if you want to warn for content just tag the post with the full word and a community warning label bcs that's the only way people can avoid content they don't want to see and/or find content they do.
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