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You’re pretty much in the minority then. I work for a big time law firm and attorneys swear in meetings. Not constantly or egregiously or in a gross way but “asshole” and “fucking” as an emphatic I hear regularly. No one cares.

Maybe in private practice, but in government, swearing is almost completely absent.

Also, those same lawyers probably don’t swear in court, and I bet you they don’t swear around clients either. Most “white collar” jobs don’t tolerate swearing.

Lawyers are generally immature assholes. Immature assholes feel the need to constantly preen and puff themselves up by swearing and acting tough. I’m actually not all that surprised that lawyers have a lot in common with YouTube people…

When I was younger, I swore because I thought it made me “cool” and “edgy.” I grew out of that phase.

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I literally co-hosted a radio show, and you think I can’t manage to avoid swearing? My OFCOM record is cleaner than a surgical suite.

That’s absurd and simply wrong. Sure, don’t swear in front of clients, don’t swear in a way that would bring HR out from their little den, beyond that, I have literally never heard of anyone who has faced any disciplinary action whatsoever just for swearing.

As C.S. Lewis wrote - “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” And as Ian McEwan wrote, “That is to say, fuck off.”

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I don’t know what puritan prude ass place you are from, but in every NY office I have ever worked in, people say fuck just as much as they do anywhere else. Nobody even notices or gives a shit.

Swears like shit, bitch, fuck, and ass are just words. We subconsciously say them as much any other word, when appropriate. Nobody clutches any pearls when they are said. To be sure we avoid saying them we have to speak slowly and carefully, or speak only from prepared written statements. Or we can make a recording and edit the words out.

On the other hand, certain racial slurs are easy to avoid saying. Even though we know they are words, they are simply not part of our vocabulary. There’s just no way that even subconsciously my brain will craft a sentence including them.

The arguments about professionalism aside, doesn’t the advertising thing seem weird? Think about premium cable shows, like Game of Thrones and Black Sails, with graphic sex and violence and swearing. Advertisers fall all over themselves to advertise on that what’s the difference with YouTube? I bet that if a channel is big enough the companies that say they don’t want swearing with their ads suddenly don’t mind so much.

PewDiePie still has advertisers. If it wasn’t for the targeted efforts of groups like WeKillGiants, Breitbart would still have the majority of their major business ad deals. Every single porn site running has ads all over, and the shadier they are, the more ads they have. If there’s one thing that’s held true practically since the inception of advertising, if something has eyes looking at it, some ad exec will be actively assigning a team to investigate putting ads on it.

How can you possibly even pretend to think this is true?

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Because it is?

Am I saying that no one swears ever? No, of course not. But in general, in most jobs, people don’t swear all the time. They don’t swear in front of their bosses. They don’t swear in front of customers or other people.

For Scott to say that it’s “extremely” difficult for him to not swear during a podcast or YouTube video is ridiculous.

When I go to the doctor, she doesn’t say to me “How’s your fucking back?” She doesn’t ask the PA for my “fucking chart.” When I leave, the person at the desk doesn’t ask me about “my fucking co-pay.”

When I go to a restaurant, the server doesn’t ask me if I want “fucking milk” with my tea or coffee.

When I go to Home Depot to buy filters for my AC, I don’t ask the employee “where’s the fucking AC filters.”

When I went to my local comic shop this weekend to buy some books, the guy sitting behind the counter didn’t say “Check out the new Fucking Batman book.”

When I go to the mechanic, a “blue collar” job, the customer representative doesn’t ask me “what’s fucking wrong with my car,” or tell me that “it will be fucking ready by Thursday.”

When you’re in a professional setting, it just doesn’t happen and it’s not appropriate. If anyone one of those people in my above examples had said those things to me, I wouldn’t be angry, but I’d be shocked. Those mechanics might be in the back swearing informally, but I never hear or see that.

I work for the largest bureaucracy in the United States, the Federal Government, and I can assure you that if you swear at work, people are going to think you’re unprofessional or worse, and if the wrong person hears you, they might make a complaint to HR. I don’t know what world Scott is living in, but in the world I live in, EVERYONE is very conscious when someone swears in the wrong setting.

And even if you swear occasionally with your friends, which is fine, it shouldn’t be that hard to not swear if you want to play by Youtube’s new rules.

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Yeah, I’m pretty sure they keep the Fucking Batman books in the section down the back, behind the curtain.

You literally just listed a bunch of situations where it’s an employee swearing to a customer or client. No shit that’s going to be punished, that was already covered, and not what anyone was talking about.

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No, they don’t say that. But if I take my car to a mechanic and ask what’s wrong with it, they might say “Your power steering is fucked up.”

At my work I’ve probably said things like “npm is a real shit show.”

It seems your puritanism has lead you to not know how to use swear words.

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I work at a shipyard for a major company that builds naval vessels, in the design department, and within the offices I hear enough swears that HBO would demonitize itself just by listening to the conversations. Down in the yard, swearing intensifies to the point the fucking paint melts off the goddamned walls . Inside the hulls of the boats, the customer (ie. NAVY seamen) puts us to shame with a display of salty language mastery I cannot even fathom to replicate.

Generally behind closed doors in informal settings many groups swear. Obviously many other groups do not make habbit of it, and I would think a Federal Govt position is obviously far outside the normal corporate experience, certainly to the point one should not assume anything about its standards, expectations of conduct or decorum, or its lifestyle in any way would apply outside of its bubble.

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What do you think a podcast or a video on YouTube is? It’s having a conversation for the benefit of a third party or an audience. The people who buy ads on YouTube are the customers. YouTube doesn’t want you to swear in front of their customers the same way those businesses I listed above don’t want their employees to swear in front of their customers. You can still swear, but now you might not get as many ads, or you might not be as high in their search results. That seems like normal life to me.

Again, putting a video up on YouTube is not having a conversation behind a “closed door.” Literally millions of people can access that video.

YouTube isn’t banning you if you swear, but if you do swear, it will reduce your chances of being suggested and will reduce your ad revenue. That’s what normal life is like. Network TV is free and you can’t swear on it. In fact, you can be fined if you do. Cable TV costs money, so you can swear, but only select channels allow swearing and usually only in the evening.

HBO is a subscription channel, which is a minority of a minority. The people who subscribe to HBO know what they’re getting into when they get it. There is a tacit understanding that the content on HBO is different from the content of NBC, CBS, or ABC. When I’m randomly watching videos on YouTube, I have no idea what the content will be. More importantly, advertisers have no idea what the content will be. Maybe advertisers don’t want to be associated with certain language. That’s their decision.

I don’t have any problem with people swearing. But there are appropriate times and places for that determined by society. And there are repercussions for swearing as well. Maybe your mechanic will say something like “Your power steering is fucked up,” but if they say that, they’re taking the chance that you might be offended and lose your business. I forget who said it, but I remember an interview with a comedian who said that while he swore in his act, every swear word he used was a conscious decision because every time you use a word like that, you’re potentially alienating a portion of your audience. You’re automatically limiting who will enjoy your work. YoutTube has decided that there will be repercussions for swearing as well. That’s their decision. If you don’t like it, make your own video streaming platform.

What I really take issue with is Scott’s hyperbole in claiming that it’s impossible to talk for an hour straight without swearing.

Swear words might not be different for you, but they are for a lot of people. And going back to YouTube, not everyone lives in NY. Again, millions of people use YouTube, and those people have no idea ahead of time if you’re going to casually throw a “fuck” or other kind of word in. Some people don’t like swear words. Some people don’t mind them, but don’t want to get in trouble for listening to a video at work where a swear word would be inappropriate. And most importantly, the people who pay YouTube money, which lets you, me, and everyone else watch videos, might not want their ads to run in a video that has swear words because the viewer of that video might associate the content of the video with the company buying the ad.

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The thing that has never made sense to me about swears is how we teach children.

“Words can’t hurt you… except for these”

I’ve never been able to come up with a valid reason why these words are bad so I use them.

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You either live a very strange life or have very repressed co-workers.

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From friends and relatives who have worked for the federal government it is basically bizzaro world and everything is basically backwards or sideways from private sector for good or ill.

Those people are puritans, so I don’t give a fuck about what they think.

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You’re entitled to your opinion. So is YouTube. But if you’re posting your videos on their website, you’re playing by their rules, and your opinion counts for fuck-all.

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This 100% has to do with Children’s toys advertising. I’m sure a large % of the advertising dollars are focused on children’s toys/family stuff, once you add cursing you never know how adult it’s going to get and those companies would not want to put their ad money towards those. Considering my daughter is obsessed currently with Engineering Family (which I’m pretty sure they just get paid a ton of money to make low budget videos about random stuff companies give them), there is probably a lot of money to be made from “Family” friendly stuff.

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The way I figure, if GameGrumps can support several people while regularly talking about Danny’s penis, then so can I.

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I think this hits it square on the head. I don’t have hard numbers but it seems that the majority of YouTube’s audience for the biggest channels are under 18 and I bet it skews on the younger side of that. If Markiplier is yelling swears and Karen the uptight soccer mom finds out Kiddo isn’t going to be allowed to watch Markiplier any more (lost eyes on ads) and depending on just how uptight Karen is maybe not buy their products. Doesn’t hurt the toy company much in the big scheme of things probably, but Paul Marketing is still going to be skittish about it because of optics and viral culture being what it is.

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