15 ms·

8chan can't be mentioned because it's a competitor I assume? But what about Gamergate, why is it taboo to discuss it?

by krelian 12y ago

Koahku 12y ago
Because GamerGate was brewing to become the new chanology, which would have been a disaster for the whole website. As for 8chan I guess it's because its address was being spammed constantly on every board and it's also considered advertising.
- lmm 12y ago
  If the original chanology wasn't a disaster, why would gamergate be one?
- Karunamon 12y ago
  That would be grounds for banning advertisment, not mention. As it stands, at least as of a couple months ago, even using the words "gamergate" or "8chan" earned you a three day automatic global ban.
sroerick 12y ago
Discussion of Gamergate has been taken down in some form from every major communications platform other than (to my limited knowledge) 8chan and twitter. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and 4chan have all removed content related to GamerGate
- ihuman 12y ago
  As far as I know, only /r/Games (the main gaming discussion subreddit) bans Gamergate. Reddit itself does not ban it.
- BryantD 12y ago
  I would state this slightly differently: discussion considered to be abusive by the moderators/admins of their sites has been taken down in some form from every major communications platform. In some cases, that discussion involves GamerGate. It is possible to construct a conspiracy theory in which GamerGate is being censored, but given the existence of (say) http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/ http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/, it's hard for me to believe that Reddit as an entity is removing all GamerGate discussion.
  - JanneVee 12y ago
    Also to fuel the conspiracy theory we have a recent ABC Nightline piece[0] which has 28,404 downvotes and 1,028 upvotes about the contentious issue. Also heavily censored comments where some of the removed comments only criticize the content of it and don't attack any specific persons in it. While comments like "4:05 That is nightmare fuel. How is it possible for a person to look so grotesque?" still aren't censored. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAyncf3DBUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAyncf3DBUQ
  - comrh 12y ago
    It is a reaction to "sea lioning" where GG seems to be injected into every possible discussion and once flagged as off topic and removed the conspiracy theory of "censorship" is fueled.
  - Torgo 12y ago
    It appears that the classification of any discussion at all, short of total condemnation was considered by many places to be "abusive". I have never in my life seen such aggressive comment-filtering, almost everywhere, as related to this topic.
  - watwut 12y ago
    Not really. Perfectly polite non-offensive discussions of GamerGate and related topics were removed. Also completely polite dissent in comments from under multiple articles (on guardian and verge for example). KotakuInAction was only reddit thread allowed to stay - and was not allowed to mention gamergate initially. Deletion comment of widely popular reviewer who screen-capped it and then tweeted to his followers was head scratching moment. Same happened to british journalist who was harassed in relation to the controversy. She commented under guardian article and her comment was deleted. She was kinda angry afterwards.
  - jsmthrowaway 12y ago
    In no way am I stating an opinion, just adding something I observed to your comment: For about a day, comments anywhere on Reddit matching `[zZ]o[eë] ?[qQ]uinn` resulted in what appeared to be an automatic global shadowban. I verified this by asking "who is Zoe Quinn?" on a throwaway. When people say totally nonpermitted discussion they might mean something like that. Again, no opinion, just context.
- ciupicri 12y ago
  What is the reason for Facebook to remove content related to GamerGate? P.S. I don't understand why am I getting down voted for asking a question.
  - sroerick 12y ago
    Talking about GamerGate on any forum will get you the craziest vote brigading you've ever seen. My original post went from 8 upvotes to -1 in less than a day. God forbid you use the hashtag on Twitter. It's like summoning demons from all sides of the argument.
hatu 12y ago
From what I could tell it quickly turned to a misogynist witch hunt with heavy doxxing and harassment and not a lot of actual substance
- yarrel 12y ago
  No that's how it started. Get the story right, people!
  - probably_wrong 12y ago
    Maybe you are just trolling, or maybe you actually believe in what you say. I know I used to believe the "it's above games journalism" point of view, as I found it had plenty of merit. In case it's the second one, I have to tell you something: it really isn't about truth in games journalism. I know a lot of people think it is, but it truly isn't. Gamergate's sword are its misogynistic views and its coordinated attacks, while it's shield is the "games journalism" angle. If you truly believe you can separate one from the other, trust me, you can't.
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      Would you care to elaborate on this further? The number of people who disagree with GamerGate, who are willing to deeply go into their reasons why, is very very tiny in my experience. Usually all you get is "gamergate is about harassing women", a link to an instance where trolls have done precisely that, and nothing further. Absolutely nothing to directly rebut the constant refrain that most people in the movement are there to crap on female developers. If you have some deeper insights, I'd love for you to share them here. I find GG to be unfairly maligned - and given the fact that they've picked a fight with primarily huge, monied interests with mass media connections, I can see why. It doesn't even need to rise to the level of massive conspiracy.
      - _delirium 12y ago
        It's also the perception I have, mostly as a kind of observation of where the harassment seems to go (admittedly personal observation, not at all studying it systematically). I've spent a good amount of time mocking the gamergate set under my real name and nobody's done much to me. Trolling them is even a bit fun; it's sometimes a little unsporting, but sometimes it's amusing [1]. In related news, I'm a white male. Yet a number of my female colleagues have gotten torrents of abuse for much less criticism than I'm doing. That milieu seems to really smell red meat when someone who's a woman in tech says something they perceive as offending them. There is also a weird obsession with tracking down previous romantic/sexual partners of women who come across their radar, either for its own sake, or in hopes that the ex-boyfriend can be goaded into saying something negative. Whereas I can call them whatever I want with impunity. None of the gamergaters seem interested in tracking down a history of my sexual partners! Besides being gendered, the other bit I've noticed is that it seems very anglosphere. We had a brief discussion in class here (Denmark) about gamergate, which I was initially very cautious about because I didn't want to be leading, but it ended up mostly fizzling because afaict students just viewed it as foreign and not their problem. They didn't seem to view it as an active debate here that they should be for or against, but rather some weird debate in America that they could only shrug about (weird debates in America that you can only shrug about are a dime a dozen). Well, maybe America plus some tagging along from CA/UK/AU. That perception is probably strengthened by the fact that the high-profile "pro-gamergate" articles have come from right-wing Anglo-American media outlets like Breitbart Media, whose politics start from a position that's pretty weird/foreign by local standards. [1] There was a period when a bunch of people had a conspiracy theory about how DiGRA (http://www.digra.org/ http://www.digra.org/), a small and mostly ineffectual professional society for academics studying games, was taking over games. Being vaguely on the fringe of that organization provided good opportunities for trollish hashtagging (I attended a DiGRA conference once, which I believe made me a member for 1 year as a result of paying the conference registration fee). It was fun to imagine ourselves as all-powerful conspirators directing the future of games, when almost no game developers have even heard of the conference (much less read its papers), and the organization's powers are such that releasing a timely call for papers once a year remains an aspirational goal.
killwhitey 12y ago
Global Rule #4 >You will not post or request personal information ("dox") or calls to invasion ("raids"). Inciting or participating in cross-board (intra-4chan) raids is also not permitted.
ANTSANTS 12y ago
The official reason was along the lines of "I don't want to host another Project Chanology," but it probably had more to do with the fact that moot was closely involved with at least one Gawker Media employee[1] and spoke at XOXO[2] alongside numerous companies and organizations that the Gamergate movement is adversarial towards. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2gvtrp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2gvtrp/ [2] http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/833450-gamergate http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/833450-gamergate EDIT: Downvote all you like. I'm not making any judgement pro or anti Gamergate in this post, I'm just pointing out a rather large conflict of interest.
- devindotcom 12y ago
  That's not what conflict of interest means
  - Uhhrrr 12y ago
    The journalist involved in the initial scandal worked for Kotaku, a Gawker site.
    - devindotcom 12y ago
      there was no "initial scandal"
      - ossreality 12y ago
        Lol this thread getting astroturfed hard. "It's about ethics in Zoe Quinn's pants". Fucking gamergate losers. Grow the fuck up you petulant children.
      - Uhhrrr 12y ago
        The initial scandal was that Nathan Grayson had been friends with the relatively unknown developer of Depression Quest for a long time, to the point of getting thanked in the credits of the game. He then plugged it, here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-quest-valve-greenlights-50-more-games/ http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-quest-v... And also covered her here: http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indie-game-reality-tv-show-that-went-to-hell-1555599284 http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indie-game-reality-tv-show-that-we... ...without disclosing the relationship. Which could have been resolved with a simple apology and adding disclosure to the articles, but several major game sites instead responded with such a storm of ridiculous charges that game journalism was instantly sullied even more than it already was. Because of this, GamerGate has been poorly covered in most game sites and rags like TechCrunch, so it's not surprising that you hadn't heard of this.
wpietri 12y ago
My guess is because 4chan was being used as an organizing nexus for a bunch of people widely seen as abusive and misogynist, and he just no longer wanted the headache. Years ago I worked on bianca.com (early community site; founded 1994, Webby 1997, closed in the dot-com bust), which had a similar unfettered-free-speech aspect to it. I feel a lot of sympathy here. Committing to publishing everything is one of those positions that is very appealing to a young idealist. But it grinds you down over time. Partly because of the content: unless you're a reptile you are faced with a series of decisions about whether this really awful thing is too awful or just awful enough. And partly because of the people: most of them are lovely and some amazing things happen when people are free to be themselves. But some are terrible and plenty are just broken, and it's those you spend 90% of your time dealing with. I saw one of the Bianca people recently and we talked a bit about 4chan and 8chan and how thoroughly grateful we were to have left those problems behind. No matter how appealing radical free speech is in theory, at the end of the day you're the person who has devoted your life to enabling awful people to say awful things. And with GamerGate, to go and do awful things as well. I imagine he's just tired of it.
- pervycreeper 12y ago
  I once saw content I found to be "objectionable". Therefore universal censorship should be instituted in every medium to make all communication conform precisely to my own opinions, sensitivities, and preferences. Edit: /s, people!
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  That's fair, but then he shouldn't have been surprised when his site started hemorrhaging users who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed. 8chan will probably last much longer than 4chan precisely because Fredrick refuses to make those judgement calls about what is and isn't acceptable. He doesn't need to bear a heavy conscience about what kind of speech he is allowing, he just follows the law to the letter and lets people do their thing. I leave you all with a fantastic speech the late Christopher Hitchens made about the freedom of speech and why there is no freedom of speech unless you extend that freedom towards people you disagree with, even the ones you find completely abhorrent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyBZNGH0TY&feature=youtu.be&t=20m41s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyBZNGH0TY&feature=youtu.be...

8chan can't be mentioned because it's a competitor I assume? But what about Gamergate, why is it taboo to discuss it?

by krelian 12y ago

8chan can't be mentioned because it's a competitor I assume? But what about Gamergate, why is it taboo to discuss it?

Because GamerGate was brewing to become the new chanology, which would have been a disaster for the whole website. As for 8chan I guess it's because its address was being spammed constantly on every board and it's also considered advertising.

lmm 12y ago
If the original chanology wasn't a disaster, why would gamergate be one?
Karunamon 12y ago
That would be grounds for banning advertisment, not mention. As it stands, at least as of a couple months ago, even using the words "gamergate" or "8chan" earned you a three day automatic global ban.

sroerick 12y ago

Discussion of Gamergate has been taken down in some form from every major communications platform other than (to my limited knowledge) 8chan and twitter. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and 4chan have all removed content related to GamerGate

ihuman 12y ago
As far as I know, only /r/Games (the main gaming discussion subreddit) bans Gamergate. Reddit itself does not ban it.
BryantD 12y ago
I would state this slightly differently: discussion considered to be abusive by the moderators/admins of their sites has been taken down in some form from every major communications platform. In some cases, that discussion involves GamerGate. It is possible to construct a conspiracy theory in which GamerGate is being censored, but given the existence of (say) http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/ http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/, it's hard for me to believe that Reddit as an entity is removing all GamerGate discussion.
- JanneVee 12y ago
  Also to fuel the conspiracy theory we have a recent ABC Nightline piece[0] which has 28,404 downvotes and 1,028 upvotes about the contentious issue. Also heavily censored comments where some of the removed comments only criticize the content of it and don't attack any specific persons in it. While comments like "4:05 That is nightmare fuel. How is it possible for a person to look so grotesque?" still aren't censored. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAyncf3DBUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAyncf3DBUQ
- comrh 12y ago
  It is a reaction to "sea lioning" where GG seems to be injected into every possible discussion and once flagged as off topic and removed the conspiracy theory of "censorship" is fueled.
- Torgo 12y ago
  It appears that the classification of any discussion at all, short of total condemnation was considered by many places to be "abusive". I have never in my life seen such aggressive comment-filtering, almost everywhere, as related to this topic.
- watwut 12y ago
  Not really. Perfectly polite non-offensive discussions of GamerGate and related topics were removed. Also completely polite dissent in comments from under multiple articles (on guardian and verge for example). KotakuInAction was only reddit thread allowed to stay - and was not allowed to mention gamergate initially. Deletion comment of widely popular reviewer who screen-capped it and then tweeted to his followers was head scratching moment. Same happened to british journalist who was harassed in relation to the controversy. She commented under guardian article and her comment was deleted. She was kinda angry afterwards.
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  In no way am I stating an opinion, just adding something I observed to your comment: For about a day, comments anywhere on Reddit matching `[zZ]o[eë] ?[qQ]uinn` resulted in what appeared to be an automatic global shadowban. I verified this by asking "who is Zoe Quinn?" on a throwaway. When people say totally nonpermitted discussion they might mean something like that. Again, no opinion, just context.
ciupicri 12y ago
What is the reason for Facebook to remove content related to GamerGate? P.S. I don't understand why am I getting down voted for asking a question.
- sroerick 12y ago
  Talking about GamerGate on any forum will get you the craziest vote brigading you've ever seen. My original post went from 8 upvotes to -1 in less than a day. God forbid you use the hashtag on Twitter. It's like summoning demons from all sides of the argument.

hatu 12y ago

From what I could tell it quickly turned to a misogynist witch hunt with heavy doxxing and harassment and not a lot of actual substance

yarrel 12y ago
No that's how it started. Get the story right, people!
- probably_wrong 12y ago
  Maybe you are just trolling, or maybe you actually believe in what you say. I know I used to believe the "it's above games journalism" point of view, as I found it had plenty of merit. In case it's the second one, I have to tell you something: it really isn't about truth in games journalism. I know a lot of people think it is, but it truly isn't. Gamergate's sword are its misogynistic views and its coordinated attacks, while it's shield is the "games journalism" angle. If you truly believe you can separate one from the other, trust me, you can't.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    Would you care to elaborate on this further? The number of people who disagree with GamerGate, who are willing to deeply go into their reasons why, is very very tiny in my experience. Usually all you get is "gamergate is about harassing women", a link to an instance where trolls have done precisely that, and nothing further. Absolutely nothing to directly rebut the constant refrain that most people in the movement are there to crap on female developers. If you have some deeper insights, I'd love for you to share them here. I find GG to be unfairly maligned - and given the fact that they've picked a fight with primarily huge, monied interests with mass media connections, I can see why. It doesn't even need to rise to the level of massive conspiracy.
    - _delirium 12y ago
      It's also the perception I have, mostly as a kind of observation of where the harassment seems to go (admittedly personal observation, not at all studying it systematically). I've spent a good amount of time mocking the gamergate set under my real name and nobody's done much to me. Trolling them is even a bit fun; it's sometimes a little unsporting, but sometimes it's amusing [1]. In related news, I'm a white male. Yet a number of my female colleagues have gotten torrents of abuse for much less criticism than I'm doing. That milieu seems to really smell red meat when someone who's a woman in tech says something they perceive as offending them. There is also a weird obsession with tracking down previous romantic/sexual partners of women who come across their radar, either for its own sake, or in hopes that the ex-boyfriend can be goaded into saying something negative. Whereas I can call them whatever I want with impunity. None of the gamergaters seem interested in tracking down a history of my sexual partners! Besides being gendered, the other bit I've noticed is that it seems very anglosphere. We had a brief discussion in class here (Denmark) about gamergate, which I was initially very cautious about because I didn't want to be leading, but it ended up mostly fizzling because afaict students just viewed it as foreign and not their problem. They didn't seem to view it as an active debate here that they should be for or against, but rather some weird debate in America that they could only shrug about (weird debates in America that you can only shrug about are a dime a dozen). Well, maybe America plus some tagging along from CA/UK/AU. That perception is probably strengthened by the fact that the high-profile "pro-gamergate" articles have come from right-wing Anglo-American media outlets like Breitbart Media, whose politics start from a position that's pretty weird/foreign by local standards. [1] There was a period when a bunch of people had a conspiracy theory about how DiGRA (http://www.digra.org/ http://www.digra.org/), a small and mostly ineffectual professional society for academics studying games, was taking over games. Being vaguely on the fringe of that organization provided good opportunities for trollish hashtagging (I attended a DiGRA conference once, which I believe made me a member for 1 year as a result of paying the conference registration fee). It was fun to imagine ourselves as all-powerful conspirators directing the future of games, when almost no game developers have even heard of the conference (much less read its papers), and the organization's powers are such that releasing a timely call for papers once a year remains an aspirational goal.

killwhitey 12y ago

Global Rule #4 >You will not post or request personal information ("dox") or calls to invasion ("raids"). Inciting or participating in cross-board (intra-4chan) raids is also not permitted.

ANTSANTS 12y ago

The official reason was along the lines of "I don't want to host another Project Chanology," but it probably had more to do with the fact that moot was closely involved with at least one Gawker Media employee[1] and spoke at XOXO[2] alongside numerous companies and organizations that the Gamergate movement is adversarial towards. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2gvtrp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2gvtrp/ [2] http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/833450-gamergate http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/833450-gamergate EDIT: Downvote all you like. I'm not making any judgement pro or anti Gamergate in this post, I'm just pointing out a rather large conflict of interest.

devindotcom 12y ago
That's not what conflict of interest means
- Uhhrrr 12y ago
  The journalist involved in the initial scandal worked for Kotaku, a Gawker site.
  - devindotcom 12y ago
    there was no "initial scandal"
    - ossreality 12y ago
      Lol this thread getting astroturfed hard. "It's about ethics in Zoe Quinn's pants". Fucking gamergate losers. Grow the fuck up you petulant children.
    - Uhhrrr 12y ago
      The initial scandal was that Nathan Grayson had been friends with the relatively unknown developer of Depression Quest for a long time, to the point of getting thanked in the credits of the game. He then plugged it, here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-quest-valve-greenlights-50-more-games/ http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/01/08/admission-quest-v... And also covered her here: http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indie-game-reality-tv-show-that-went-to-hell-1555599284 http://tmi.kotaku.com/the-indie-game-reality-tv-show-that-we... ...without disclosing the relationship. Which could have been resolved with a simple apology and adding disclosure to the articles, but several major game sites instead responded with such a storm of ridiculous charges that game journalism was instantly sullied even more than it already was. Because of this, GamerGate has been poorly covered in most game sites and rags like TechCrunch, so it's not surprising that you hadn't heard of this.

wpietri 12y ago

My guess is because 4chan was being used as an organizing nexus for a bunch of people widely seen as abusive and misogynist, and he just no longer wanted the headache. Years ago I worked on bianca.com (early community site; founded 1994, Webby 1997, closed in the dot-com bust), which had a similar unfettered-free-speech aspect to it. I feel a lot of sympathy here. Committing to publishing everything is one of those positions that is very appealing to a young idealist. But it grinds you down over time. Partly because of the content: unless you're a reptile you are faced with a series of decisions about whether this really awful thing is too awful or just awful enough. And partly because of the people: most of them are lovely and some amazing things happen when people are free to be themselves. But some are terrible and plenty are just broken, and it's those you spend 90% of your time dealing with. I saw one of the Bianca people recently and we talked a bit about 4chan and 8chan and how thoroughly grateful we were to have left those problems behind. No matter how appealing radical free speech is in theory, at the end of the day you're the person who has devoted your life to enabling awful people to say awful things. And with GamerGate, to go and do awful things as well. I imagine he's just tired of it.

pervycreeper 12y ago
I once saw content I found to be "objectionable". Therefore universal censorship should be instituted in every medium to make all communication conform precisely to my own opinions, sensitivities, and preferences. Edit: /s, people!
ANTSANTS 12y ago
That's fair, but then he shouldn't have been surprised when his site started hemorrhaging users who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed. 8chan will probably last much longer than 4chan precisely because Fredrick refuses to make those judgement calls about what is and isn't acceptable. He doesn't need to bear a heavy conscience about what kind of speech he is allowing, he just follows the law to the letter and lets people do their thing. I leave you all with a fantastic speech the late Christopher Hitchens made about the freedom of speech and why there is no freedom of speech unless you extend that freedom towards people you disagree with, even the ones you find completely abhorrent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyBZNGH0TY&feature=youtu.be&t=20m41s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyBZNGH0TY&feature=youtu.be...