This has been a rough week in the real world for me, but today something happened that put a big ol’ smile on my face. First off, Twitter made it very clear where they stand on blockbots by effectively implementing a feature that does the same thing by allowing users to share blocked user lists. This, of course, greatly upset our resident miscreants residing on Reddit’s preferred GamerGate hangout because our founding fathers bled and died so that righteous defenders of good gaming could bombard feminists with insults, anime porn and pictures of dismembered corpses. But hey, turns out that was just the appetizer!
Later, Reddit announced that they were going to close 5 subreddits, all of whom have populations that are sub-5000, with the exception of Fat People Hate, a message board dedicating to finding pictures of fatties and mocking them, with an occasional side order of actually sending a brigade of shit posters to harass said fat people and occasionally try to push them towards suicide. The announcement made it clear that the subs that were shut down were frequently those who engaged in abusive or harassing behavior. The choices raised some eyebrows. For example, CoonTown (it’s an awful link – just don’t click it) is still up – admins would later explain that that’s because CoonTown tends to keep its vile shit localized to its own subreddit, instead of brigading others.
Naturally, KotakuInAction (the #gamergate subreddit) is supernervous, to the degree that they’ve been making contingency plans in case they get banned as well. Not because GamerGate ACTUALLY harasses people. That’s completely a misunderstanding fed by media hype. As an example of said media hype, here’s a story of how a college student was utterly bombarded by harassment at the hands of #gamergaters for daring to talk about them at a game conference. And here they are brigading the /planetside subreddit because a mod banned a player who made a transphobic slam, and would only let him back in if he wrote a 500 word essay.
Anyway, this was after two more utterly embarrassing episodes for Gaming Assholishness. First off, they managed to look like utter hypocrites by cheering for Ubisoft excluding Kotaku from coverage because Kotaku has had some hard-hitting coverage of Ubisoft in the last year – including Kotaku calling attention to and refusing to take part in embargoed reviews after Ubisoft’s attempts to snow their customers on the half-baked status of AC:Unity.
At any rate, KiA and Twitter tonight are schadenfreude delights today
A lie often repeated does not become truth by repetition specially if you are a SJW of design. #GamerGate
You should change the name of the blog to that. It would be applauded by your side and more honest.
He even linked to everything he stated as evidence and yet you still call him a liar? Face facts, Gamergate is about harassment of other people and attacking anyone who criticizes them or has anything to do with topics of racism, sexism, or LGBT issues.
Face the facts? which facts? post any, post proof that GamerGate has ANYTHING to do with harassment, i wanna see evidence
By the way, biased articles that source each other are not evidence
Look at its origin story. Dude cuckolded himself by accusing his ex of sleeping around. Then some asshole who used to be on a scifi TV show people liked made a hashtag. Then lots of people started shitting up Twitter.
That was nine months ago. If you don’t get it, you’re an idiot or you’re willfully ignorant. There is no more wiggle room. If you have something to say, say it without Gamergate. Otherwise, you’re a rando troll.
So, once again you’ve helicoptered in here in order to accuse me of being a liar, without a shred of an attempt to actually challenge the evidence or arguments I’ve given. This gets tiresome,
Here’s the deal: it’s pretty much a given at this point that GamerGate is more about preserving the right to be a disgusting shitlord, and attempting to silence or eradicate progressive voices from gaming by any means necessary. It’s also pretty much uncontroversial to anyone who observes GamerGate that they are more than willing to engage in actions that other normal rational humans consider to be harassment: brigading and dogpiling are the ones that they openly and willingly brag about on KiA and 8chan. And its also plain as day that GamerGate has a cadre of horrible, horrible people who engage in worse acts of harassment against their top targets (who still DOMINATE discussions on KiA despite the fact that, say, Anita has nothing to do with game ethics), and that the rank and file go out of their way to avoid condemning it and indeed to even cheer it the fuck on, while claiming weakly that they cannot be held accountable for what their leaderless, anonymous movement accomplishes.
There are legitimate discussions to be had about the role of diversity in games, or of issues of impropriety in the gaming press. GamerGate has made all of these discussions HARDER because they have so little understanding of the underlying issues, and such a fast and loose association with the actual truth and/or what ethics actually is, that they have actually massively slowed down any progress towards accomplishing things in either arena.
If you are saying that the above isn’t true, then you are either a liar or an idiot. You want to challenge that statement, then bring some facts, because what you’re bringing now is some pretty weak tea.
Name calling Damion? You need to do better.
You and yours want control. We shall never give. Deal with it.
You have no basis telling anyone they need to do better. Especially not the owner of the blog you’re posting on.
If the show fits, wear it. Take the L.
And again, no evidence, no counterargument. Just a desperate attempt to disregard my factual argument as ad hominem.
Youmade acusations no factual evidence of anykind You make blank statements You are horrible and shitlords and 4th grade name calling and I have to “disprove’ you. You are everything you pretend to figth, The evidence is your own words. Grow up.
Ricardo Lima, I would ask if you understand basic logic and arguments, but I think you’ve already made it clear that you don’t.
Here is how an argument works (feel free to take a Logic or Philosophy 101 class at your local college if you doubt me). Someone states a premise ideally with evidence, makes an inference and then comes to a conclusion.
Over the course of the past 9 months or so, Damion has stated his premises and provided his evidence (I feel like I have to inform you that hyperlinks take you to the source of Damion’s evidence). To claim he has no factual evidence demonstrates an willful ignorance of hyperlinks or a refusal to actually use them. Of course, there is always the option that you are simply being disingenuous.
Now, if you would like to refute his evidence, that would an actual element of a discussion that would be valuable. Or, equally valid, would be to attack the inference or conclusion. These are methods of having a useful discussion that may lead to uncovering a flaw in Damion’s argument.
But you are refusing to do this (i.e. participate in a discussion). Instead, you are making claims that are obviously and verify-ably untrue. Therefore, you can be dismissed out of hand.
If you should choose to participate in a discussion instead of making nonsense statements, please feel free to provide refutation of the evidence provided, or talk about your problems with the inference or conclusion.
Your presumption “Unbound” is as arrogant as is flawed. Your logic and Damions is self serving and your accusations and judgements are flawless because you say so. l Kotaku cleared Kotaku of any wrongdoing that’s all the proof you need. And all video games are stupid of course.
I have read your cherry picked evidence to death as I have read this blog too often really got sick of it. Both of you treat your huge confirmation bias added to your “progressive” ideology as the only evidence you need and ignore anything said or shown otherwise. And please spare me articles spewing the libel and the media altars you built to your select few special victims who share your toxic ideology.
Feminist Frequency are ideologues masking as media critics who always treated disagreement as harassment while spewing their sexist and racist ideology (who get cleared of being called such because your ideology redefines what sexism and racism are) who attacks every game and gamer who doesn’t bow down to it or be branded misogynic and racist. Standard SJW progressive tactic bury the opposition in media noise, panic and fear mongering. Anything for for you is justified anything against you is vile.
We wont let your bunch dictate what we should think, like or do. The ends don’t justify the means and you are everything you pretend to fight.
Ahh, this is closer to, you know, an argument. It’s a reasonably easy to refute argument, but hey, at least you’re no longer just drive-by shooting ad hominem attacks. That being said, here’s your problem.
Kotaku has, in the past, eaten crow when they’ve fucked up. Kotaku was also pretty open about their findings regarding Zoe Quinn and Nathan Grayson, and found that there was nothing to talk about. This information has since been seen and reviewed by many, many people at many, many outlets, and the only people who aren’t satisfied are the people over at Deepfreeze.it who seem to legitimately believe that game journalists should never be friends with game developers under any circumstances, which is so far divorced from how actual contact-managing happens in any genre that we’d have no functioning press at all if all journalists skewed towards KiA’s rules. In short, #GamerGate doesn’t know what ethical journalism is, and their track record for finding ethical violations is bad, and usually points to places where they simply disagree ideologically with sites.
You may claim that I cherry pick evidence. I find that I usually saturation bomb my articles with multiple links that give concurring viewpoints, and that I often link to dissenting points of view. However, if you want to see true cherry-picking, the best place to go is (ironically) reviews of Anita’s work, who all seem to pick on the one or two mistakes she made and treat that as invalidation for her entire arguments. By contrast, when I point to major harassment campaigns that KiA and GamerGate have involved themselves in, it is trivially for me to link to at least a dozen similar campaigns.
People who have strong ideological points of view are allowed to make media criticism. For example, Total Biscuit has a strong ideological point of view. I would have no problem at all with people arguing that, for example, Anita Sarkeesian is wrong — hell, I have done it here on my blog on more than one occasion myself. What I find to be ‘harassment’ is FUCKING HARASSMENT. The fact that her and many other gamergate opponents have had to involve the Police and the FBI is a sign that the harassment is real. The fact that Twitter has had to announce that they are changing their rules and offering improved tools in response to activity on Twitter, and then used GamerGate as an example, is evidence that the harassment is real. I have no problem with people telling Anita is wrong – hell, academics spend ALL FUCKING DAY telling each other they are wrong, because that’s what academia IS. I have a very big problem with people contacting her with rape threats, or attempting to dissuade her from speaking with bomb threats, or people trying to brigade her IMDB page in an attempt to utterly discredit her point of view instead of fairly argue it.
However, there’s a good reason why her opponents don’t want to argue against her point of view. They know it’s a losing argument if they fight fair. This is why you can be as determined as you want that you won’t give in. The problem is that GamerGate has already lost. Game studios NEED to reach more diverse and international audiences in order to justify the ever-increasing budgets of making triple-AAA games. Game studios are ALREADY building their games and game portfolios to reach a larger audience, and inviting Anita to come and give seminars on how to do so more effectively. The people who are fighting against it are going to look back ten years from now feeling pretty dumb about it.
The threats gave her a wider audience than ever so who did them it either wanted to benefit Feminist Frequency or are all violent idiots or both . You associate with them with as a easy way to discredit us and validate her paper thin arguments of pure ideology.
A lot wishful thinking in your statements Damion. You want to listen and believe is you call, you don’t get to make that call for everybody else. “Losing argument” from ideologues who only give talks to people who already agree with them. Echo chamber indeed.
You ignore the harassment done by “SJWs” and their many threats of violence that existed before GG even. Hopefully law agencies can catch any true wrongdoer independent of the politics they are behind.
. We win by not giving in , and we never will.
And im sure a lot gaming companies will be putting Fem Freq seals of approval on their products soon.
Oh, yes, the good ol’ “Anita and Zoe were just faking it in order to get hits.” This is mass delusion on an idiotic scale, and one we certainly have come to associate with the mouthbreathing idiots that still cling to the faded #gamergate banner as it hovers towards obsolescence. We associate the threats with #GamerGate because, well, Gamergate does things like stalk Zoe’s restraining order court case, and because there are plenty of idiots on 8chan who are too stupid to hide their actions.
As for winning versus losing, I happen to be in the industry, and I happen to know how change is actually happening in the industry. You say that you win by not giving in – well, you lose by being stubborn assholes who draw attention to your opponents. Thanks to the actions of #gamergate, more people know of Anita and her points of view than ever before, and many game designers are considering her points of view as they build games. Thanks to the actions of #gamergate, more game companies and social media companies are taking the problems of harassment seriously.
In short, every time you post, you just more firmly establish that you have no idea on the real landscape of what’s going on outside of the echo chamber that is the gamergate circle jerk. Gamergate is openly derided and mocked in many circles populated by game executives, experienced game designers, game academics, and the gaming press. Not to mention the fact that the majority of actual gamers actually know nothing about your cause, or have actively rejected it. You can keep on throwing out ‘THE FIRE RISES’, but in truth, the fire is dwindling and has been constantly for months, only occasionally working itself up again to engage in bullshit scandals that have nothing to do with ethics in games journalism (GDC? Ellen Pao?).
If you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, feel free. If you want to talk about SJW influence in games, be my guess. But Gamergate is a joke, and deserves no more fucking credence by actual game professionals than a baboon throwing darts at a bingo card.
I never said they faked anything nor I think they even faked most if any of the threats, thrown their way . What I stated is they gained prominence and profited from them and still do. But you want deny this fact go ahead and white knight your professional victims for your ideology which is what you are truly doing.
Keep pushing. Make up more fanciful media altars. Stretch the truth until it breaks.
Actually GG made thousands of gamers who were unaware on how corrupt and deceitful the gaming press is, and how full of bile, intolerant bigots the social justice pretenders truly are. Fear and hate for gender and race indeed.
You are a idiot unless you agree with me is your most repeated argument.
Don’t worry I won,t post here further.You can keep preaching to your choir and they will applaud your “wisdom”
Good luck on your internet witch hunt. You will need it .
Sure, they gained prominence. They also gained a mountain of legal fees and a life of living in unease and fear. Seriously, even starting off with that professional victim bullshit makes you someone who is simply not worth listening to. Also, sod yourself for deciding that standing up for what I think is right is ‘white knighting’ and should be worthy of derision. Also, my gaming tastes don’t line up with either one, I don’t match their ideology. I just stand firmly opposed to people who believe that they are doing my hobby, my profession and my lifestyle any good by attempting to silence voices that don’t match up with their own.
Gamergate is an anti-free speech movement. I oppose them direly on those grounds.
The gaming press is not particularly corrupt or deceitful. This is a world of self-delusion that you have managed to sell yourself in order to justify the bad behavior of the crowd that you now run with. In the time since GG has started, bad behavior by the press has been pretty much absent, to the degree that GG has had to go back well before GG to come up with most stuff, and in most cases, fabricate bullshit out of nothing, such as claiming that sharing drinks with developers or being on a mailing list with each other was somehow unethical.
Lastly, a gamergater accusing others of being on a witch hunt is ironic to the extreme. Take a fucking break from the idiocy, go away from the controversy for a month, then come back and actually realize how stupid KiA and their ilk look.
“Don’t worry I won,t post here further.”
Quoted for posterity.
I guess you had a bad week, huh?
“A lie often repeated does not become truth by repetition”
If it turned out that #GamerGate had a secret esoteric belief that repeating something often enough magically made it true, like The Secret, that would explain a lot.
And wasn’t Gamergate suddenly jumping to the defense of “Fat People Hate”, completely unaware that gamers are usually stereotyped as morbidly obese people who can’t move out of their parents’ basement?
Also, blockbots are tools for lazy people who make decisions on whom to read based entirely on the assessment of others, so as to reinforce the group dynamic – with us or against us. That’s the way cults think. Little wonder the comparison I have in mind is the Catholic index; just replace the pope with an algorithm.
You can’t fix Twitter. The problem with Twitter is what makes it Twitter.
Twitter: Your own personal echo chamber.
Absolutely true, but if you haven’t noticed, people REALLY LIKE their echo chambers, and Twitter is more than willing as a platform to let people have them. Twitter is a business, afterall, so they’ll absolutely let any side have their say, as long as laws (like harassment laws) aren’t being broken, because they like money. Businesses are totally allowed to dictate the rules of their site. Period. Don’t like it, don’t frequent their business.
Oddly enough, you want a forum where everything people say would be allowed? It’d have to be US government run, as the US government is the only organization that *has* to fully respect the right of free speech, dictated by our own Constitution. Businesses? They don’t have to, and forcing them to would be, you guessed it, too much government interference in business.
Funny how reality works.
“Also, blockbots are tools for lazy people who make decisions on whom to read based entirely on the assessment of others”
Yeah, just like spam filters!
Unless you are reading web pages by typing in random IP addresses, then you are making decisions on which hyperlinked URLs to read based on the assessment of others.
“lazy people” just means “people who realize that their time on this earth is finite and precious”.
Yes, I make decisions whenever I click on a link or whatever. Spam, however, contributes nothing to a conversation; it’s not interested in anything except in selling something. And since I’m not among those who think money = speech, I’ll gladly keep on spam-blocking (and yes, running Adblock, even should it block out a few legitimate advertisers along the way).
But with a blockbot, you’re entrusting what you should or shouldn’t read to someone you don’t know, whether it’s just a person acting by quasi-papal fiat, or an algorithm whose inner workings are likewise decided by one or a select group of persons.
And it’s bad whether it’s Randi Harper running the Index Twittorum Prohibitorum or Twitter itself. It leads to a mentality where you have to conform to be considered “part of the team”, read the same people, and block the same people, as though the best way to encourage discussion in a public space is to let someone else decide when you should plug your ears.
No thanks.
When you click on PCGamer, you’re entrusting what you should or shouldn’t read to someone you don’t know (the editor of that magazine). When you click on Reddit, you’re entrusting what you should or shouldn’t read to someone you don’t know (the mods). This is, for most people, actually the preferred way that people like to read the media – they like to have content that caters to their particular tastes. One of the key aspects of the web has been a steady movement towards more specialized content, because with an online worldwide community, it is easy to find like-minded people in whatever niche you want to swim in.
When MOST PEOPLE use twitter, they choose to follow mostly people who they find interesting and compelling, which is to say that they opt to follow people who they generally agree with, or at least agree with regarding the rules of relative civility. However, the ability to send people messages directly allows people to break that rule. While I’m generally only following people who roughly match my tastes and/or rules of decorum, plenty of asshat shitlord gamergaters follow me, and fill my twitter feed with hateful bullshit if I post anything even remotely critical of the movement. Some of them also do things like send messages to friends and family members, or when I was working at EA, to my community manager or other superiors.
I generally don’t use twitter enough for this to be a problem, but for many others, particularly journalists, Twitter is an increasingly vital part of how one finds leads, seeks out contacts, and floats ideas. This is something that Twitter wants to encourage. People who oppose blockbots basically think that every argument should be won by the people who can mobilize the loudest, shrillest, most obnoxious shitlords. This is not something that Twitter wants to encourage, and is in fact their single largest existential threat.
I don’t like Breitbart. I don’t read Breitbart. I may write a post called “Why I don’t read Breitbart” on my blog, in the hope that I could convince people not to read Breitbart (though I’m well aware that it may end up convincing some people to start reading it, through no argumentative fault of my own).
But I don’t have the pretense of coding Breitblock to cleanse the world around me from all things Breitbart in my search results.
Now, let’s suppose I did come up with Breitblock, and now I say to people who installed it: “Well, it turns out I don’t like The Escapist either. So I’m going to expand Breitblock to also block The Escapist.”
Who decided that? I did. But is it possible to detest Breitbart and like The Escapist? Indeed. But I say to those people who installed Breitblock: “Well, you don’t get to choose. Breitblock is my baby and I also don’t like The Escapist, so there.”
If I had been one of the people who had installed Breitblock, I would immediately have removed it upon seeing where it was going — it was now well past the tipping point where Breitblock wasn’t so much anymore about blocking one particular site you didn’t like, but was now about setting up its creator as an arbiter of what should and shouldn’t be read. And by installing Breitblock, I had unwittingly granted the creator the ability to dictate what I should or shouldn’t read.
And who knows, maybe Breitbart will come up with an article actually worth reading every now and then? I remember the case of someone creating a script to block Wikipedia links from search results. Unless you have a grudge against Jimmy Wales or the Wikimedia Foundation, I don’t see anyone denying that there are some subjects on which Wikipedia excels — if you’re into lists of TV show episodes and the like. Yes, you shouldn’t rely on it for the finer points of the Scottish Enlightenment, which should go without saying; but a Wikipedia-blocking bot doesn’t care whether you’re looking for a genuinely encyclopedic subject or the list of actors playing redshirts in Star Trek: it just blocks everything Wikipedia because it’s Wikipedia.
Which is not unlike Gamergate and its infamous boycott lists that included every major gaming site and even mainstream media that reported negatively on the movement. Imagine a Gamergate-made script that blocked all of them and instead encouraged you to get your news from The Ralph Retort or Return of Kings.
And now, the Twitterbot. If I were presumptuous enough to believe that the future of humankind hinged on its adherence to my reading tastes and actually created a Breitblock, I would list every site I would block, with reasons why. But I couldn’t get past the hypocrisy that would entail. i.e. my having to read the sites in question to justify blocking them, and presumably having to keep on reading them in case they changed enough to lift my block, while I denied everyone else the possibility to do so and make up their minds. And that’s why I don’t do it: I’m not demanding that the rest of the world align with my dictates.
And that’s why I don’t trust and use blockbots. There is a finality to them that I do not like, an assumption that goes past “I don’t have to listen to you” and right into pocket-Stalin territory with “in my world, you don’t exist”. And it’s not even “my world” — it’s the blockbot creator’s. Even if it’s just block-by-algorithm, it’s then the world of the vox-populi.
Reminds me of that time Lum wanted to try an experiment on Broken Forum where: “If a post gets X dislike/this post is dumb entries it will be automagically hidden for THE ENTIRE BOARD.” (He couldn’t get it to work, so he never implemented it.) Well, if Lum doesn’t like a post and wants it gone, I’m okay with that: that’s his board, he can do as he wants with it. But I don’t like the idea that when a highly organized cabal gains critical mass according to his algorithm, it should get a final say over what others get to read.
So yeah, no Index Twittorum Prohibitorum for me, especially when it’s made by someone I don’t know, nor respect, even if I may agree that 99% of the people blocked by it weren’t worth my time anyway. It’s the possibility that the 1% that remains might be worth reading, and that some people were placed on that list because of reasons external to the concern at stake, that makes it unacceptable. And again, there’s the finality of blocking, as though one’s ideal world is one that’s been airbrushed for publication in a glossy magazine. Well, my world comes with the warts.
And frankly, though I have a Twitter account, I don’t like Twitter. It’s now telling me that I should follow one Damion Schubert. I’ve never taken a look at your Twitter feed; any interaction I had was through your site, so I’m concerned about Twitter’s respect for users’ privacy.
Self-loathing people exist. I have no doubt that a lot of the “Fat People Hate” people are themselves overweight.
And since “Fat People Hate” was all about shaming people into suicide, you mean to tell me it’s all made up of people who have a death wish and only aim at convincing themselves to carry it out? Let’s just say that I’m not convinced.
It would indeed be quite noble (if completely misguided) for Gaters to stand up for the freedom of speech of people who deride them. Which flies in the face of all the evidence surrounding Gamergate since the beginning, since the movement will gladly shut down even lines of inquiry that it doesn’t want to hear.
Hasn’t the past 9 months taught people that censoring voices doesnt kill them. The blockbot is 6 months old, give or take and yet people still complain.
I’m not sure what twitter and reddit is thinking. To play daily whack a mole?
If the whole point is to continue complaining and causing chaos and noise without end, then that’s what the blockbot has been for. Another reason to ceaselessly gripe. Voices don’t get silenced unless they get moderated, and then the volume just gets turned down.
Reddit is probably hoping the worst elements will choose to leave and go to voat or 8chan.
Twitter is interested in being sure that their platform isn’t made obsolete by a bunch of jackasses who will attempt to dominate any conversation with pure white noise.
But what if the search engine was returning page after page of Breitbart and Breitbart-like results, to the point where it was really hard to find articles that you wanted to read? Wouldn’t you get tired of wasting your time at some point, and see if there was a way to pre-filter the search results, even there were a few false positives that threw out pages you were interested in?
(This is actually how Google became so popular. Back in the Old Days, the top search engines were Yahoo and Alta Vista, but they had gotten to the point of being borderline useless because so many of the search results were worthless commercial spam. Google figured out a fix for that, and everyone switched to them practically overnight.)
The point of this isn’t to create an “Librorum Prohibitorum” of stuff that you’re forbidden to read because it will damage your soul. It’s to take a best guess at helping you find stuff that you want to read, by hiding stuff that you don’t want to read. It won’t be 100% accurate, but it doesn’t need to be. If someone sends you a link to a story with the note, “You should read this! I don’t know how it ever got published on Breitbart, it’s actually well-researched and makes sense.” then you’re free to follow the link.