site banner

Whence coddling? Or: why is everything boring now?

This is just a quick-and-dirty thought I had while browsing the roundup thread tonight, and I figured I'd just dash it out here since I want to post something else in the big thread and not clutter it up.

Part of what spurred this was a recent video by Rimmy Downunder, who you might recognize as the Australian guy who uploads a lot of edited videos about Arma 3 and other kinds of simulationist-type games. It's an hour-long video, so to quickly summarize: if you are a big creator on YouTube, you should never ask Team YouTube for help on Twitter whenever one of your videos gets demonetized or age-restricted, because in the name of consistency, they will just go through your channel and do the same thing to all of your videos, making your algorithm performance and monetization drop even further. Contained within this video is discussion of new rules for advertiser-friendliness--specifically, the guidelines around profanity and the severity, frequency, and latency with which it is uttered in a video--changes that weren't exactly announced by YouTube, along with new policies for how YouTube reviews creators' appeals against the dings they get.

This post isn't about recent drama on a social media platform so big that it should really be regulated as a common carrier, or even about the constant frustration with inconsistent enforcement of rules, but instead, it's about the degree to which our modern society seems to be drilling down on making things all sanitized and offense-free.

Just to talk about YouTube a little more, I've been aware for a while that the entire design of YouTube--what is allowed, what is punished, and what is incentivized, whether that be through the algorithm or the automated content-policing systems they almost certainly have deployed--is set up to push creators into making the absolute safest content possible. I don't feel like digging up all the videos that talk about this phenomenon, but as an example: if you want to maximize your potential ad revenue on YouTube as a gaming channel, you need to play kid-friendly games (like Minecraft and Fortnite), say absolutely no swear words (at most, you might get away with TV-friendly minced oaths), and basically treat any copyrighted material (or even anything that could plausibly get claimed by some anonymous third party) like the plague. Add on sponsorships and upsells of patronage sites, and it makes for content you or I might consider...banal.

But again, this is about the direction we're all being pushed in. I could ramble here about how excellence and hard work aren't rewarded on a particular website, but this goes beyond YouTube and all social media platforms. Why is it that we've moved from a culture that was permissive with expression (to put it a certain way) to one where something even slightly outre is left to wither on the vine? (Okay, sure, you can find weird and shocking modern art, but probably a lot of said modern art is made to help sell people on the idea of Marxism or whatever, as opposed to something like Dilbert 3 [NSFW] which presumably isn't trying to push any message and just exists, well, because.)

Likely, you're already aware of how the modern Culture War has had its effects on pop culture and media, where any work that gets advertised on TV or pushed to the front shelves of your local bookstore or recommended online often has to fit in with modern sensibilities, so I won't rehash the history of that here. Creators often subscribe to various versions and formulations of progressive ideals, people will judge past works through the lens of today, and what was perfectly acceptable within the tits-n'-beer liberalism milieu of old is often scrutinized today.

There's also the other cultural aspects of this coddling/infantilization/whatever-you-want-to-call-it memeplex. Many Americans are becoming more and more like the hikikomori of Japan, one of the less-inflammatory ways of describing the current state of the battle of the sexes is that the male gender role has been razed and not rebuilt (this was the post that spurred this one, but this topic has come up before), and we may have accidentally re-invented segregation because it's easier to not interact with those outside our specific demographics rather than trying to interact with them and risk reputational homicide.

So, the question I have is: where did all this come from, and why? Is it what some call "safetyism," the impulse to prevent harm at all costs and take no risks whatsoever? Relatedly, is it because legal liability is treated as a mortal risk, because lawsuits can be a punishment in themselves? Is it because of the unkillable zombie Boomers who, even in their old age, and with all of the pains they've suffered in their long lives, keenly remember the trauma of troubled childhoods the most, and have used their power as the current generation of power-holders to make sure that no child ever grows up feeling hardship?* Is it some combination of all three things, where nobody really complains about the effect it has on the broader culture so long as some politician's (grand)kids are doing okay?

I'm not necessarily advocating for edginess for edginess' sake (though I think that could have value), but I think American society has somehow forgotten how to masterfully blend novelty, maturity, and creativity, and right now, it seems like the only people who take risks are the same people who can't handle them (or, at least, they tend to make a poor showing once they start doing whatever it is they do).

*Granted, some of the people responsible might be Gen Xers instead, such as YT's current CEO and possibly their content moderation team, too.

19
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So, the question I have is: where did all this come from, and why? Is it what some call "safetyism," the impulse to prevent harm at all costs and take no risks whatsoever? Relatedly, is it because legal liability is treated as a mortal risk, because lawsuits can be a punishment in themselves?

Simple, it's a consequence of the top man-made disaster ever, the 19th amendment of the United States constitution.

Less facetious reply:

Consequence of both the tend to 'therapeutic state' and legal liability. Female suffrage probably playing a fairly significant role here, I believe.

It's fine if you want to argue against women's suffrage, but you should bring arguments in proportion to how far outside of the current Overton Window it is.

It's a well known fact women are more neurotic and safety-minded, also less likely to be well informed in regards to scientific facts, and overwhelmingly disfavor e.g. nuclear power, objectively one of the safest forms of power generation.

It's fine if you want to argue against women's suffrage, but you should bring arguments in proportion to how far outside of the current Overton Window it is.

Smash Overton window.

OP is obviously for some reasons fine with men voting.

It would be good to hear his arguments for male suffrage, arguments why not noble blood or superior learning as in traditional societies, but mere possession of penis should entitle even most ignorant mudblooded commoner to meddle in public affairs?

Some arguments that would justify peasant man deciding about government that wouldn't apply equally to peasant woman.

Who needs "conservatism" or "traditionalism" that want to conserve gains of 18th century revolutions?

Humans have generally been lazy their entire lives (there's a reason people love labor-saving technology). Why bother handling risk if you don't need to? Better to just eliminate it altogether. Blaming it on woman's suffrage ignores the role of age, and how risk-taking is a property mostly of the young (the exception being cases where you need to risk money or resources, since wealth is more often found in the hands of the elderly who have had time to accumulate it).

I'll have to read up on the "theraputic state" thing some more, but as to the rest of your post, I'm skeptical that it is simply because of female preference. Again, I think age is the bigger factor than sex/gender, and this doesn't tell me much other than maybe gesturing at BronzeAgePervert's "longhouse ethics."

I think it comes from the homogenous nature of how we consume online content. We have virtual monopolies (or nearly so — there are three main social media sites, and a couple of short video/photo sharing sites) in most media consumed online. You want articles? Reddit is the front pages of the internet. Videos? Almost everything is on YouTube. Talk with friends? Facebook, or maybe instagram or Snapchat. Politics and news are Twitter. And most of these have very poor filtering between groups. A post on Reddit is at least potentially available to anyone who happens by. And this is true of most of these sites — anyone logged on can potentially see anything on the site.

But this presents a problem because there’s the risk of offending people (who then leave) or seen by underage people (potentially opening up legal risks). Or because someone might just tattle to advertising buyers. The easy solution is to create rules that assume that kids and very easily offended people are watching everything and make rules that fit that. Essentially, make the site PG rather than R rated. Remove everything controversial or risky.

In the old days of the internet, it was a lot different precisely because there were thousands of forums each catering to a different audience. Geeks could create knowing that their tentacle alien woman wasn’t going to be seen by a ten year old or reported to HR. I mean who’s going to Stardestroter.net that isn’t a hardcore Star Wars fan. Donna the wine mom wouldn’t like it, but she’s unlikely to see it. And if the website is age restricted, no ten year old sees it either. Essentially the early internet was like having a million channels. Each one could cater to a specific audience and creators could create whatever they wanted for whichever audience they wanted without worrying that people who didn’t understand would see the stuff and get offended.

Modern internet is a lot more like the days of network TV before cable. Back then you had three or four channels that had to appeal to everyone, because in 1980, kids watched those same four channels just like adults, and mom and dad watched the same shows. So you ended up with banal boring shit because it was safe viewing.

Yeah, if you compare the mainest of today's streams to a curated collection of decades past--is it so surprising that they look different?

I'm reminded of a reddit thread about a guy restoring a 70s sound system for his dad. To complete the package, he burned a CD picking from an actual 197X radio schedule of some local station. He was surprised to find how much airtime was given over to "disco and shitty doo-wop." I can't find the link, but that quote really stuck with me.

probably a lot of said modern art is made to help sell people on the idea of Marxism or whatever

Creators often subscribe to various versions and formulations of progressive ideals, people will judge past works through the lens of today, and what was perfectly acceptable within the tits-n'-beer liberalism milieu of old is often scrutinized today.

Many Americans are becoming more and more like the hikikomori of Japan

I think these generalizations demand more specific evidence. Whether or not you have the impression that Western culture has fallen into an infantilizing death spiral, new art continues to be created. Some of it will be progressive and thus, I assume, dead to you. Some will be decent by any technical standards; this may or may not indicate that it is "safe" and boring art. And some, the top 10 or 1 or 0.1%, will be remembered.

I think American society has somehow forgotten how to masterfully blend novelty, maturity, and creativity, and right now, it seems like the only people who take risks are the same people who can't handle them

If we could reliably tell visionaries from cranks, we wouldn't have stock tropes of the misunderstood genius Vindicated by History. Or, for that matter, the reclusive or starving artists. The latter archetype even requires a safe, boring mainstream to reject.

History is littered with geniuses ahead of their time. Today, we have the privilege of hindsight. That means picking through decades of disco and shitty doo-wop, perhaps on YouTube, to find the absolute cream of the crop. Looking back on panned movies and laughing at critics who didn't "get" it. Praising the Warhols and Van Goghs who burned bright regardless of whether or not they burned out. They weren't the only ones who took risks--just the ones who got remembered for it.

Whether or not you have the impression that Western culture has fallen into an infantilizing death spiral, new art continues to be created. Some of it will be progressive and thus, I assume, dead to you. Some will be decent by any technical standards; this may or may not indicate that it is "safe" and boring art. And some, the top 10 or 1 or 0.1%, will be remembered.

Oh, believe me, I'm aware the (digital) world is quite wide. I suppose my lament is more that I feel like less and less art is stupid for its own sake, if that makes sense. I made this post from what is admittedly a Very Online perspective, and I got to watch the rise of creators like RubberFruit, Ross Scott, and much of the Channel Awesome/That Guy With The Glasses crew. I mentioned in an older post that I essentially missed the days when the Internet was free to be stupid, a time before algorithmically-driven engagement. Nowadays, the most "derp" you find is in TikTok, but that has its own issues--maybe I'm just being the boomer, but it's not quite the same (it's not even quite like Vine, which was more of a magical time).

I suppose I can take comfort in that even the people who I think are underrated now (Drue Langlois, Capussi, Zeurel) will probably be vindicated later, as you say.

I spent a lot of time on /r/youtubehaiku and /r/gifsound in my [REDACTED] years. Whatever those subs are today doesn't capture the magic, the inanity of little 15 second clips fished from the depths of YouTube. Vine took on some of that energy, and I'm sure there's a section of TikTok doing something similar...just as niche subreddits got their start by distilling a certain type of humor.

There's an author out there who goes by the handle wadapan. He writes short fiction, largely related to the Transformers fandom. At least some parts of the wildly unhinged tfwiki can be credited to him. Perhaps his most iconic work is a series of relettered 80s comics culminating in a deconstructive triumph of fan culture, The Beast Within (My Pants). Explaining why this overgrown shitpost is at all funny is beyond me. Explaining why it is clever, in spite of itself...well, I guess you have to read the author's notes, a breakdown so elaborate that they stand as comedy on their own.

I jest, of course. Much more important is the fact that he used to be into Homestuck. Immersing himself in never-before-seen levels of irony, he comprehended the true face of fan culture. Perhaps this addendum sums it up, but I prefer another user's musing:

hsd is the only place where someone can add an extra "o" or two to "no" and everyone, including me, who had never explicitly been taught this, could immediately tell they were channelling the spirit of a short clip of legendary cinema "the fesh pince of blair", a video with 2 million views where an unusually elongated "no" plays. i remember this moment because this joke referenced content relatively rarely spoken about, and several people immediately jumped on it based on a one letter variation in a two letter word, which is a testament to the horrific memetic entanglement of people who have read the same tens of millions of words for fun.

It's still out there. Weird, surreal, defying expectations of quality and of effort alike. You won't find it in the mainstream, but that's because of the same old selection pressures that have driven "selling out" since long before the Internet. 99% of everything was always passé. You were just lucky enough to be on the right parts of the Internet while they were still a wild frontier.

Pining for the bland tastes of the mainstream is a lost cause. All we can do is seek out our own slices of horrific memetic entanglement, wherever they may be, and take pleasure in what we know to be good.

Oh, man, don't get me started on Irony, I think there's been some groundwater contamination from that stuff over the past decade.

It can't only be laid at the feet of some exec imposing norms on the masses below them. Advertisers cater to their customer base, and their customers are us: people, weak humans with stone-age psychology insufficient to the demands of liberal modernity.

It should be possible to separate the content from the advertisers, the art from the artist. We should understand that when le_edgy_tuber6969 drops N-bombs, says "fuck" every two words, and giggles "Kanye was right", scoring hundreds of thousands of views, this does not reflect on the politics of the company that pops up in the ad box for two seconds before the average person hits 'skip'.

In practice, people either can't do it, or disagree that they even should; that, yes, the company in the ad box is to blame for platforming/supporting le_edgy_tuber_6969.

It can't only be laid at the feet of some exec imposing norms on the masses below them. Advertisers cater to their customer base, and their customers are us: people, weak humans with stone-age psychology insufficient to the demands of liberal modernity.

Even if their customer mostly made the distinction, it would only take one incident for an advertiser to try and insist the people they work with not act in ways that might lead to controversy. All else equal, they'd prefer fewer controversies to more of them.

True, but what if a high profile demonetization or removal caused a greater controversy than the objectionable content?

I genuinely cannot think of a case where this happened. While new sponsors may come about, this is almost never immediately when a controversy is still in public discussion.

Hell, the biggest outcry against this kind of behavior was when Matt Wattson went nuclear on YouTube by contacting their advertisers and telling them that YouTube was hosting monetized paid content that was jailbait and pedophilic in nature. Wattson was and probably still is a fool who can and should be routinely shamed for being so eager to escalate this issue, but it saw many, many channels affected and YouTube had to scramble to address this and regain their income stream. They seem to have recovered, but only by continuously ratcheting up the requirements to get monetized. This is not the only reason that there has been a trend towards sanitizing the monetized content, but it is a big one.

I don't mean to attack you specifically but I find this viewpoint so degrading. I think that most people out there really can and would understand the nuances of the issue, but that it's just a very tiny minority of people who feel helpless and are seeking power who would bother to make a fuss about the advertisers associating with problematic youtubers. Indeed, to me it seems like a propensity of the executive class to protect their own interests against a vocal minority by belittling and downplaying the sophistication of the rest of the audience, at the expense of the audience.

I don't disagree, and maybe phrased my objection poorly.

I think it comes down to a tacit acceptance of the vocal minority's complaints as legitimate. Rather than pushing back against the advertisers saying "hey! what the hell? Give us back our obscene/offensive content!", they/we nod along and say "well that sucks, but I understand why they would pull that".

That gets into the discussion of platforming, and whether a social media platform is simply a place where things can be put, or if they indeed have editorial oversight. I agree with you in that something over the line shouldn't be taken as a reflection on the platform itself, but that ship has long since sailed, and as I mentioned in the OP, where the line is drawn can change quite a bit.

No, they don't, and this is mostly an excuse to allow those who are tightening the screws to diffuse blame. Nobody was punishing companies for advertising on Twitter when Musk took over; activists at ad agencies did that and used this sort of risk as an excuse.

I think you're ignoring a major problem with how YouTube is set-up in the first place.

They have a Kids version of the platform - why are they insisting that the normal platform adhere to those rules as well? "Think about the kids!" is fine here, parents want to know that their kids are not watching material traditionally deemed "inappropriate" (we haven't quite updated for the kid-friendly influencer plague). But YouTube wants the now theoretically kid-free platform to follow the kid rules as well.

It's not surprising that YouTube wants less risk, but there's no need for them to assume responsibility for a parent's failure to control what their kids are seeing.

That's capitalism, baybeeeeeee!

IE, They are the only game in town; so they are free to sacrifice quality of service to increase profitability.

Some of it reflects the modern youth being far more reviewable ('seeable-to-a-state') than any demographic in history, at far smaller scales, and social pressures encouraging that review. It's at least possible for every letter a kid types on a laptop to go to their parent or school IT administrator; meatspace environments are more often policed literally and figuratively to an extent that would make Victorian chaperones envious; I've written at length about MineCraft coming up with a fairly interesting approach to allow Microsoft to react to bad behavior on servers operated entirely by third parties. That shouldn't destroy an adult-and-later-teens focused environment, but various economic pressures favoring centralization (and funding and investment sources that are extremely coddling-favorable themselves) along with the aftermath of have split the visible internet more readily into a large all-ages, a small not-porn or mixed-media adult, and moderately-sized porn, and a vague gray-market environment.

((For an example on that hard-division: my Reddit account is marked as NSFW, and I'm 99% sure it's because I posted in /r/furrydiffusion, because there's two top-level posts in that subreddit that was porn, even though mine were not. This only happened years after my top-upvoted comment every was about gay sex, which did not. Which doesn't matter for me, except when I'm trying to look for a post of my own without being logged in.))

Part of it's that a lot of the media is economic, in ways that stuff in the way-long-ago of a decade ago wasn't. There are professional VTubers, and a larger number who at least cover (some of) their production costs; while a few people worry about demonetization or age restrictions for limits to their visibility, most do want and often need the money, and that money is coming through different means and approaches than present in the 00s. PayPal could (and would) close your donation account if someone put too horny a joke in the tip jar, but even if Boxu doesn't care, someone can end up getting attention that does (cw: FFXIV 5.0 spoilers) (though contrast here, cw: FFXIV 5.x raid spoilers, dick discussion, audio references to amazingly gifted crossdressers, and be glad that I'm not linking to the earlier 'gooch press' discussion which manages to be worse).

Some of this does reflect YouTube (and The Internet) being something different socially than its technical equivalents were in the 90s and 00s. The monetized half-million subscriber accounts are more similar to broadcast or a cable television stations in their relative size and position in the media ecosystem than they are the Wacky Newgrounds Animations, and the outside pressures change to reflect that. Rimmy's analysis is a little more obnoxious-sounding than the sort of reviews that the Comics Code or Hayes Code, if less for covered content and more because YouTube can't manage to keep the rules straight for a few weeks at a time.

Even for YouTube specifically, people who bite the bullet on demonetization can get pretty weird and NSFW (cw: furry, swears, adult humour, love-bombing, gay) without getting delisted from search or banned; even with the monetization rules I know of a VTuber (cw: furry, vtuber, adult humour, sex jokes, gaaaaaaay) that's been flogging his daikamura (discount code: KNOT) for months. Tits-and-beer liberalism has been replaced to an extent by tits-and-dick-and-beer-and-weed liberalism, but it's still there and for the not-interested-in-trans-women guys, some of it doesn't even have the tits and dick on the same person. When you go to less seeable-to-a-state places, things get weird quick even stuff that normally attracts the attention of Big Corporations.

Of course, there was a point where tits-and-beer was accepted even on the cable televisions. And it's pretty noticeable when you see things on YouTube looking at the same creator's own past (cw: sexual violence joke, people taking Dragon Ball Z's plot more seriously than its author). Understandings of what's funny and what is beyond the pale changed a lot. It's tempting to notice and frame that change solely through the Culture War, and that's certainly a vector, but I don't think it's the only or even controlling one: the terror under it all is a world crafted by lawyers and for lawyers, built not only of bubble wrap but with a prohibition on popping it.

And I say "crafted by lawyers and for lawyers" because some part of the vector is legal or threats-of-legal, but I think the underlying thing is deeper than that: there's a parallel to the 'seeing-as-a-state', where individual workplaces and fields of study teach different viewpoints of and approaches to measure the world, and that this starts to adjust your understanding of the world and risk. While not every lawyer does it, the overwhelming field encourages thinking about things in the sense of things like attractive nuisance and eggshell skull, where mere responsibility is not enough, even and especially when the doctrines do not cover the specific context. If you brought the LEGO lawyers in and said neither COPPA nor general law would or under CDA230 could hold them responsible for someone making a dick in their game, and that no sane observer would, they wouldn't care. If you told YouTube that they're censoring more heavily and arbitrarily than radio stations, they'd still point to the risk of getting pulled before the Senate.

It's tempting to call it risk-aversion, but it's more loss-aversion and of that a very specific kind. Even very likely benefits get scraped and even likely downsides are accepted where the change is too seeable. You mention even likely-unsuccessful lawsuits as a harmful on their own, aka the process is the punishment, but it's not even just the courts! The Twitter stuff is almost certainly due to the political valence of that moderation (most overtly, a common complaint was about all of the slurs showing up on the complainant's following page), but I don't think that's the sort of tooling that got thrown together overnight, or even had its first test case in this circumstance.

And once a tool exists -- even if its first uses were 'good!' -- it's very easy to be guided by the beauty of our weapons.

((and... I'm very suspicious that there have been behind-closed-door meetings encouraging this at the level of law or regulation; indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the bullshit Rimmy's running into is because the behind-closed-door meetings don't want to be too specific in a form that could be leaked but still want to get buttons pushed.))

If you're looking for some kind of Golden Age where coddling such as you describe didn't exist, you're not going to find it. If you do find it, it's going to be uncomfortably recent and remarkably brief. The first prominent Twitter ban was of internet troll Charles C. Johnson in the spring of 2015. The first Twitter ban of anyone who was well-known for something other than being banned from Twitter was Milo Yiannopoulos's ban in the summer of 2016. Twitter was founded in 2006 but wasn't relevant until around 2009, so that's 6 or 7 years of virtually unmoderated Twitter. Reddit started banning its more controversial subs around 2015 as well, but it didn't start to become remotely popular until 2011ish, and didn't reach the kind of cultural prominence of Twitter until well after the censorship had been implemented. Youtube has always imposed some level of censorship (e.g. no porn), but started demonetizing videos advertisers found distasteful around 2016. YouTube is a special case, though, because while it's been popular since practically its launch in 2005, most of the early videos were all reposts of traditional media and stupid home videos, with occasional how-to content. The idea of making a living from YouTube doesn't really arise until around 2012, with the emergence of PewDiePie, and most of these people would be putting out that kind of crappy content designed for teenagers until around 2104, when the idea of producing quality, documentary-style content would start to take hold.

So we're looking at what was, at most, a 5 year period where Americans weren't being coddled, starting sometime in the very late '00s and ending in the mid-'10s, when the major social media platforms were prominent enough to have cultural relevance but were relatively uncensored and unmoderated. But what about before that? Facebook was limited to college students before 2008. Most of the others didn't exist before 2004. There were blogs, of course, but there are still blogs, and no one really moderates them anyway. They aren't as culturally important as they used to be, but that's because most of the popular ones were anodyne enough that their creators had no problem fitting into whatever restrictions the social media companies are enforcing. Before 2000 the internet was a buzzword and media curiosity, not something that was central to people's lives or replaced anything particularly relevant. It was also viewed by most people as a pointless cesspool, precisely because of it's totally unregulated nature (I remember when the content of most arbitrarily selected chatrooms was profanity-laced outbursts from teenagers). It should be mentioned that this was also a time when the most popular ISP was AOL, notorious for their "Walled Garden" approach.

Before 1995 the internet was the exclusive domain of enthusiasts and hippies who thought that the medium had the power to transform consciousness and make the world a better place. This was also a time when the internet had little to no cultural relevance. The dreams of these early adopters were shattered in the latter part of the decade when the masses came online and promptly shattered any dreams of a new utopia. In the 1990s the average American's ability to contribute to the public discourse was limited to call-in talk shows and newspaper letters to the editor, and you better believe that they had standards on what they would allow. The only place on television to see tits or hear the F-word was HBO and Cinemax. The YouTube equivalent was public access cable. There was various pearl clutching about goths, Marilyn Manson, Mortal Kombat, Law and Order, and a bare ass on NYPD Blue. Prior to NYPD Blue, even mild swearing was rarely heard on TV.

Prior to the 1980s songs were regularly banned from radio for being suggestive, or sometimes for having unintelligible lyrics that might be suggestive. Prior to the 1970s pornography was virtually impossible to come by; Playboy didn't show pubic hair until 1969 I think. George Carlin's "7 Words" bit led to FCC standards that prohibited certain material from being aired during the daytime. Of course, before this, such standards were unnecessary, because no one would even think to air such material. In the 1960s mildly vulgar comedy like Lenny Bruce was enough to get you sentenced to 4 months in a workhouse. Books like Naked Lunch were banned in some places and hard to find in others. From 1933 to 1968 Hollywood was bound by the Hayes Code following an uproar in the content of films. Nothing in pre-code Hollywood would be particularly objectionable by today's standards. Prior to the 1930s Ulysses was banned in the US. Prior to that there were Comstock laws. Prior to that was the Victorian Era, the most notoriously prudish period in Western history, where many of our most cherished euphemisms come from. And I don't know too much about the Regency period, but if you have to go back that far your argument sucks anyway.

The point I'm trying to make is that censorship doesn't happen in a vacuum. The censorship of social media was a direct response to its increased reach and popularity. Of course advertisers don't want objectionable material on YouTube; they don't want it on cable TV (which is unregulated), so it would be ridiculous to expect them to not want it elsewhere. On the whole, society is much more permissive than at any time in the past. To you it may seem like things have gotten more restrictive, but I suspect that that's because, as an admittedly always-online person, you were participating in communities that only mattered to other always-online people, which isn't most people. Once these communities became mainstream, there was pressure to sand off the rough edges to make them palatable to mainstream tastes. If you want to publish edgy content you still can, you just have to publish it in places where it will only be viewed by a small community of devotees and won't make any money.

In 2010 Canada decided that "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits was now too edgy for Canadian radio.

Mid 1990s - early 2010s have been described as an "interglacial period" where there was a lot of freedom to discuss ideas and cover edgy topics in entertainment aimed at adults.

It turned out to simply be a censorship interregnum while our conservative overlords were replaced by progressive overlords.