Hiroyuki Nishimura the previous administrator of 2ch.net sold the user data of 2channel users and he was fired by Jim, who happens to be the host of 8ch.net.
2ch also offered a paid post deletion service used by political parties when Nishimura was running it, after the 2ch coup he scraped the site and started 2ch.sc
>He is one of few individuals with a deep understanding of what it means to provide a digital home for tens of millions of people for more than a decade. There is nobody more qualified than Hiroyuki to lead 4chan, and I can't think of a person better suited for the task.
The Japanese government payed him to take down politically sensitive posts on 2channel[1]. He's probably the worst person to put in charge of a community according those who were subjected to him in the past.
A few days ago, an article was posted how WhatsApp has scaled to nearly a billion users and is still running with only 50 engineers. Isn't running 4chan more impressive feat being run, if I am not wrong, by just one engineer, and that too from a time when web development tools weren't anywhere close to what we have today.
Yes and no. For some crazy reason it's easier to run server infrastructure when you're not doing hyper-aggressive data collection and running computationally complex operations to fetch and decide the data to display.
It's impressive in the sense that the staff size is in the order of magnitude you would expect given their publicly-visible product. Many companies will brag about their ops staff being big (because they're so great that their system has to scale) or small (because they're so great at building scalable systems), but operate so opaquely you have zero way to judge the impressiveness of the number and you have to trust the opinion of a journalist that doesn't even care to know.
2ch has been, for over a decade, one of (if not always the absolute) largest discussion forums in Japan. No matter what the base system is, there's some serious infrastructure there.
Plenty of people have ran huge sites by themselves. Marcus Frind of POF comes to mind. He had over 30 million users a month back in 2007 and no employees. It's not that hard if you know what you're doing.
First, just as a point of fact, WhatsApp is mostly mobile development and network engineering messaging systems, not web development. Disciplines that one would normally classify under "software engineering".
Second, you appear to be confusing Fundamentals of Engineering exams and Principles of Engineering exams. There is no Fundamentals of Engineering exam for any engineering discipline, including structural, electrical, etc. Only the PE exam focuses on individual disciplines. FE is for...fundamentals.
Finally, and ironically, they do in fact make a Principles of Engineering certification exam for software engineers[1]. It's been offered for almost 5 years now. As of last year, the majority of states offered the exam and license software engineers just as they do other engineering candidates.
It's a test that university graduates in the traditional engineering disciplines (civil, mechanical, etc.) usually take in the USA. After 5 years of work experience, you take another test, then your state's licensing board gives you a stamp and the credential "Professional Engineer" (P.E.). You can then take on liability for project documents that you stamp, so you charge clients/employers more money.
It's mainly useful if you work for a consulting company.
It's weird, because 2channel recently had a big user exodus. A lot of users used desktop clients. Those were banned in a push to monetize. As a result, a lot of 2ch users started lots of 2ch replacement subreddits, the largest being newsokur: https://www.reddit.com/r/newsokur
The exodus was from the Kenmou board who refused affiliate marketing on their board they claimed was data mining their IPs. The desktop clients weren't banned, just really old browsers they were using were no longer supported due to new methods of embedding ads. A lot of them used legacy browsers like this one which is no longer in development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazehakase
Note that 2channel's URL is not 2chan.net, but 2ch.net, and it's a text-only site. It is more commonly known as "2ch". It's interesting to see that both 2ch/2chan have not really changed since they were created, whereas 4chan went through quite a bit of "modernising". I wonder if 4chan might start turning back to a 2ch/2chan-ish style with this.
I really like the 2chan style, it's simple and nostalgia-inducing. The 4chan modernisations such as the thread title in the URL, the removal of the e-mail field, the re-numbering of pages starting from 0 to 1.
It would be much nicer if they could put on a version of Futallaby with a modification for image replies (I believe Saguaro does this) or use Wakaba (much more featured, but using Perl).
By directly invoking Godwin himself, are you saying that Godwin created something so influential, that shaped internet culture for better and for worse, that Godwin's Law itself is an achievement to be proud of, even if he never made much money from it?
He's comparing him to Hitler. Hitler had a huge influence on the world, for better and for worse, but that doesn't mean it is something he should necessarily be proud of.
As someone who says the hell away from 4chan, I still say he did impressive work. Probably not going to be hired by Walt Disney, but there's a lot of other places out there.
moot stated that his reasons for leaving 4chan this year have to do with the personal stress of managing such a volatile community, especially with the vitriol of the gamergaters holing up on the boards. For the previous 12 years he wasn't making very much money and at one point he took on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to keep the site operational.
Whether or not he's making money with the sale now is beyond the point; he clearly wasn't running 4chan as a monetary venture.
Disagree. 4chan is great and important. It shaped the Internet we know today in so many great ways, and in a few cautionary ways as well. Moot should be proud.
Much of the dank memes that have become completely mainstream in social media can be traced to 4chan in one way or another. Something Awful also used to be responsible for a lot, but lost relevance a long time ago.
I don't know if this is "great" as in implying a positive value judgment, but it is great in magnitude.
Something Awful is also the only reason that 4chan exists in the first place. It was created as a refuge for the SA anime forum (ADTRW) after Lowtax purged the users from Raspberry Heaven (the SA DC++ hub for anime). Nearly every founding admin/mod was a permabanned SA user.
Not really. A lot of the mods were current or former FYAG/FYAD posters. Only a few were banned, and the big anime witch hunts came much later.
Raspberry Heaven was kind of a splinter from the semi-official SADCHUB. Lowtax never had any influence on either.
RH and ADTRW actually both had their own off-SA fora created to avoid the overall SA attitude, though neither was used much. When moot created 4chan it was more out of the general fascination with 2chan's image boards, particularly /a and /b, which were mostly random (but not 4chan /b random) artwork, without much commentary.
Look past the media slant and you will find one of the last true bad lands of the internet, mired in post irony, where speech is free and each poster's opinion is as equally without value as another. Where unpopular opinions are given as much weight as popular ones (i.e. barely any). Its equal parts a utopia and a cesspool.
Without it, there would be no such thing as "internet culture".
As a practical example, /out/ and /diy/ are two of the only places on the internet where you can get useful information about gear. Everything else is tainted by ad money.
When the competition is 99% pimping and astroturfing for advertisers, being 10% useful and only 90% noise makes /out/ about ten times as information dense as any other place on the internet. This is why people who don't read or agree with /pol/ none the less welcome /pol/ as it keeps the advertisers away. Given the choice of ruining /out/ or making moot a billionaire, oddly enough the users of /out/ prefer having a nice clean place to hang out, sucks to be moot.
/fit/ ironically does not discuss actual fitness, but is more a social group for people into fitness to discuss seemingly everything except fitness related issues. On rare occasion /fit/ will actually talk about gear and then the advice is good AFAIK. There is unfortunately some bro-science on /fit/ mixed in with real science, then again asking ecological science questions in /out/ would get equally dumb answers, but the dumb answers on /out/ would be more self aware of their own ignorance, whereas on /fit/ its here's my anecdote, "anecdote" being latin fancy speak for "fact", or at least the guys on /fit/ like to think so.
/out/ has a bad fascination with gadgetry, there must always be a pointless eternal thread about giant rambo-style "survival" knives, as a containment thread to keep them out of the real discussions. The concept of the containment thread or containment board is possibly a 4chan innovation and a real advance in social media and online discussion?
/b/, which is almost yet not entirely a cesspool, has had better literary criticism of this site than /biz/, which is funny. The standard deviation of quality on /b/ is extremely high. The std deviation of quality on /out/ is much lower but the average quality on /out/ is much higher than /b/. If nothing else, as a lab of observations about anonymous discussion, its interesting. I'd propose a general rule that the more focused the board, its heights of brilliance will be lower and further between at the same time as the average level of discourse increases.
>I'd propose a general rule that the more focused the board, its heights of brilliance will be lower and further between at the same time as the average level of discourse increases.
It seems to me that there seem to be some ideal community sizes when it comes to creating interesting, novel, and useful content. Back when 4chan was much smaller, /b/ (random) seemed to be generating new memes more frequently and with a higher average quality. But as 4chan grew, /b/ has tended to slide into more lowest common denominator content (e.g. porn and gore).
I think there was something similar on /v/ (the video game board). At a certain point, the community grew too large to have a coherent collective consciousness. The solution in this case was to create an entire board of "containment threads" for the popular video games and subcultures. This freed /v/ up more to discussing what was trending in the video game world without having to deal with the pesky people playing games and talking about them.
Today, some smaller boards like /mu/ and /fit/ and /k/ seem to be at just the right level of activity to support a vibrant, evolving culture complete with "localised memes" which sometimes cross-pollinate to other boards or outward to the general internet.
>As a practical example, /out/ and /diy/ are two of the only places on the internet where you can get useful information about gear. Everything else is tainted by ad money.
Maybe /g/ is just more aware of the shills? I have a picture where one of the Windows Nokia phones had like 200+ threads made within a week all with the same image and very similar OP. There's a lot of shills and unfortunately it can take some effort to convince people "this is a shill thread". Sometimes a fake-advice question will get posted with fake answers meant to shill a product/service as the solution.
>/fit/ ironically does not discuss actual fitness, but is more a social group for people into fitness to discuss seemingly everything except fitness related issues.
Mostly just 'mirin each other.
I feel like people who have a very negative outlook of 4chan (as a whole) either never ventured outside of /b/ or can't wade through the cruft to get to the actual good discussion.
With the help of 2 friends of mine, we hosted a fun "learn interesting physics" thread for a while. There was also a guy who hosted Reverse Engineering threads (his job was to reverse engineer malware...). Both very informative and a lot of people took genuine interest.
I also made a short (and now defunct, though I can rehost it) web-based puzzle for people on /g/ to learn a bit about encryption. Starting with a simple ROT13 and working up to audio stenography.
It's a lot like Reddit with, I'd argue, a bit more extreme on the "bad" side - equivalent on the "good" side - but a lot more honest opinions due to anonymity. You'll get a lot of smart people who (wisely) value their public image self-censoring themselves on Reddit. Though on an anonymous board, they're more free to say what they want to say.
In exchange for that honesty and freedom of opinion - you get a lot more of the "darker side" of humanity. (Ignoring it doesn't make it go away, as so many people seem to believe.)
The level of honest opinions is something I enjoy - and is something that is increasingly being lost on an ever-connected web where one politically incorrect statement can lose you your job/career.
>I also made a short (and now defunct, though I can rehost it) web-based puzzle for people on /g/ to learn a bit about encryption. Starting with a simple ROT13 and working up to audio stenography.
Durrcada? If so, I found it very fun even though my attention span is too short for that sort of things.
So how would the reddit equivalents of /out or /fit compare for example. I don't really see a lot of advertiser banning for example. Is it because there is more moderation in those communities?
Not all of it was "great", but definitevely left their mark on the internet and in society:
Of the top of my head:
- The thousands of memes, from rickrolling to rage comics.
- Dusty the cat
- Project Chanology
- Gamergate
- The Fappening
- Karen, the school bus monitor
- Snakes on a Plane (movie), Cave Story (game) and many others became highly successfull after becoming viral in 4chan.
- Risk of Rain (game), Engine Heart (tabletop rpg) are commercial products that were created by anons with the help of 4chan.
- Many other free quality media being created, from videogames (Katawa Shoujo), to tabletop rpgs (Adeptus Evangelion), wargames, comics, music, etc. [0]
- 9001 lulz/day
[0] I would know more, but I mostly browse /tg/ and /v/ related boards.
I believe Minecraft also first gained initial popularity there or where it was initially exposed to a larger audience, back when it was still alpha.
4chan is where a lot of things took root or first came to be "before they were cool", and they might never have been cool or gone unnoticed on other communities. It was a catch all for the best and worst of what you could find on the Internet. It's a place where the worst and best of human behavior is laid bare, uncensored, and could be dealt with or discussed on equal terms and some of the most honest discourse (in terms of true opinions) took place no matter how ugly or uncomfortable the subject matter was. That has value, if nothing else to better understand how messed up society and humans are when they aren't being polite or fearful of consequences. It rids you of any naivety you might have once had, even if its not a place you want to spend any amount of time or participate. If nothing else, it gives the worst of those people a place to go instead of poisoning other online communities with their insanity.
Off the top of my head, memes are one of the biggest contributions. Examples such as nyan cat, rickrolling, crudely drawn cartoons etc. Not to mention 4channers once even rigged the Time man of the year poll. One can also find negative influences such as extreme trolling.
The influence is not on the technical side of things, but more to do with shaping internet culture.
I was talking about what he will be known for (which is pretty much /b/ and /pol/), not what 4chan is. That's a much different conversation, and not exactly black or white.
I'm willing to bet he'll do a lot more great things in the future, and "created 4chan", even if you didn't capture much value from it, is more than 99.999% of people have accomplished.
Incredible resume, but it doesn't necessarily mean companies will be lining up to hire moot.
What I mean is: 4chan was a singular achievement. You couldn't exactly just slot moot in at Imgur or Reddit or Hacker News or some other community; his talents wouldn't necessarily be transferable/applicable.
I say that with a great deal of respect for moot and what he built, even if some really horrible stuff came out of that place.
He also had another webpage, the name escapes me, that ran for quite a while. And if I am not super-mistaken, a similar app. While it/they failed in the end, it definitely shows additional drive coming from him.
Does the "horrible" stuff _really_ matter though? Do you think the admins/creators of reddit should deserve less credit/respect because of the many horrible subreddits? I really don't see why the bad stuff would lower the achievement/respect towards moot, he has always been against it, cooperated with law and police and he has 'staff' that are dedicated to remove the bad stuff. Why aren't those things considered?
I definitely don't think moot has a lack of drive or talent!
Does the "horrible" stuff _really_ matter though?
I should have phrased that better. No, I don't blame moot for that stuff. If we are going to have open and/or anonymous communities, some regrettable user-generated stuff is inevitable. Moot fought the good fight as far as I could tell.
You believe that? Dude banked on both the sale and takeover, plus the ad revenue when he was running the site.
He had no alternative but to push the poverty myth (Kevin Rose@Digg also did this). Can you imagine what the users would do if he disclosed how much he was raking in?
My guess? $10 million n/w post sale, most likely much more.
Okay, so considering that 4chan didn't accept donations, didn't have any form of user-generated revenue until the (very recent) 4chan pass thing, Poole has always maintained that the site was a money loser.
Also, cheap to run? The bandwidth costs alone would be HUGE.
Not sure why you think he has a motive to lie about this - and if he does, again, put forth some evidence rather than spurious accusations. Calling the guy a liar with no proof to the contrary is just so much cheap sniping.
He was sole founder, but allegedly had shadow investors.
Sale/takeover - Similar sites that sold, Reddit, myspace ($35m), Digg. 4chans value to particular buyers, potential with a pivot/reculture. It's a smoking hot site for PR if you can fool/fake the users, and right now it's election time.
What would you say 4chan is maximally worth to the buyer who can extract the most value from it? I can see someone dropping $40-$50m.
I am not convinced that repeating a lie a thousand times will make this claim the truth. The propaganda may have worked well back when gamergate was completely unknown to the general public, but we are past that, I think.
Yeah, no. People claiming "harassment!" absent evidence is not proof of said harassment existing, doubly so when the people shouting the loudest have a profit motive for its supposed existence.
Also: It would be rather disingenuous to claim that gamergate are a bunch of harassers without acknowledging that prominent people within the movement have received things like syringes and knives in the mail... and been blackballed from the industry..
Kind of puts in perspective this "harassment", which at its worst, can be described as "people saying mean things on the internet".
Perception is reality. And it seems the perception is that Gahergate is a group of harrasors. You (not you personally) saying it is not will not change that perception.
It seems to me that if you want Gamegate to be taken seriously (though I think it is way to late for that) Gamergate needs to start cleaning out it ranks.
Which highlights the real issue. Gamergate has no central entity. So there are going to be people harrassing under the banner of Gamergate, and you can’t do anything about it. The name is tarnished, full stop. It will be almost impossible for Gamergate to do any good now, assuming it ever wanted to good!
You (not you personally) saying it is not will not change that perception.
Perhaps, but correcting misinformation wherever its seen should be the goal of anyone connected with the movement. Perceptions can change.
Gamers have been a marginalized group for pretty much as long as the hobby has existed, so this is nothing new. People lying about them, their hobby, making fun of them as losers and shut-ins and immature and criminals in training, this is all de rigeur. One more insult on the pile doesn't change much.
>Gamergate needs to start cleaning out it ranks.
How so? Other than shouting down harassers, I'm not sure what action you expect a bunch of people centered around a hashtag and an idea to take.
>It will be almost impossible for Gamergate to do any good now
I'd say they've done quite a lot of good already. Disclosure policies at multiple journalism outfits enacted, FTC rules on paid endorsements being clarified due largely in part to an emailing campaign, hundreds of thousands of dollars raised for various charities...
>I'd say they've done quite a lot of good already.
Absolutely, and the saddest part about all this is that entities with painfully overt agendas (The Verge/Vox, Ars Technica, etc.) were more than happy to report on all the negatives, and will still continue to, while reporting none of the good that's come out of it.
Same with people on this site for the most part: they've completely made up their mind about what Gamergate stands for and will hear nothing else about it. Which is hilariously ironic given how much this site likes to tote itself as a well-educated bunch. Groupthink/hivemind tendencies are always the same for any community of humans.
Thing is, it's hard to not to get the wrong idea. All the people complaining the loudest about Gamergate have serious media connections.
Unchallenged falsehoods in multiple media outlets -> Sourced by Wikipedia per their usual secondary source rules -> Shows up on the front page of Google where most normal people will see it.
You actually have to have an interest in this stuff and actually dig to see that the narrative is false/misleading.
igreulich is correct - the name has been very successfully tarnished. Problem is, moving on to something else is a move that has zero benefit (because the same problems would just happen again under any new name), so the hivemind wisely decided to stay put.
> The overwhelming majority of their coverage consists solely of reprinting verbatim the anecdotal and often unverified accounts from controversial figures who directly profit from being considered targets of harassment — Zoe Quinn being a good example.
> Often described as an indie developer, Quinn has produced very little aside from the low-effort, unpolished free text adventure Depression Quest. More notable about Quinn was the disproportionate attention she got from the gaming press despite her limited accomplishments, from journalists such as her financial backer Ben Kuchera of Polygon and her friend Patricia Hernandez of Kotaku.
> Hernandez has also promoted two Kickstarters by GaymerX while being on friendly terms with the organization's president Toni Rocca and some of the other GaymerX staff. She has also given positive press, without disclosure, to her friends David Gallant and Zoe Quinn.
> Positive coverage of Zoe Quinn in three articles, without disclosing their friendship and eventual affair. Later covered Quinn again, disclosing they "dated briefly", but not that he had previously financially supported her.
> One of the first things that seems quite possibly true about Zoe Quinn is the fact that she plays heavily into self-victimization. Now I will concede that I am not entirely knowledgeable about the psychology behind self-victimization, but what it is defined as makes it fairly easy to identify.
> The most high profile example of this was Zoe Quinn’s claim that Wizardchan raided and doxxed (acquired and revealed personal info) her. That whole affair is best summed up here. Basically, the takeaway from that is that her accusations hold little if any merit at all. What is consistently seen throughout that is how easily she puts herself forward as a victim and asks for consolation from a variety of personalities and sites. Even if you only read the text surrounding the images of her tweets and other communications, you can see this.
This is supposed to be an example of a site that doesn't promote and continue harassment? I can see why people think gamergate advocates are the worst kind of fucking scumbag.
Wait, what? Did you click through any of the links on those pages you cite? In the very fist example you mention, every bit of that is substantiated via an archive link. Quinn's game is unpolished garbage as revied, Kuchera did contribute financially to her, and Hernandez is friends with her and did write about her without disclosing that.
Those are not lies, or even misleading in the least. They are all trivially verifiable facts. All the sources are right there.
I'll go through the others if you wish, but I'd ask you to examine the evidence and point out problems with it before just dismissing it as lies. Heck, I might learn something here.
The fact some gamergaters don't like Quinn's game doesn't make it "garbage". It's not a traditional game. That doesn't mean that rating it highly is somehow a violation of ethics.
The idea that Quinn somehow used personal connections to get literally tens of thousands of people to highly rate her game violates Occam's razor.
Tens of thousands, involved in a scheme? No, of course not, and I have no doubt that a lot of people liked it. That was a subjective judgement on my part - I think it's low effort nonsense.
Here's the thing - would those tens of thousands of people have seen it in the first place if Hernandez hadn't talked up her friend on Kotaku? Would that niche of a title have wound up on the site at all if not for the personal connection between those two?
I suspect the answers to both those questions are "no".
Have you ever actually made a video game yourself, or written a piece of literature? Do you appreciate the effort this actually takes?
> Here's the thing - would those tens of thousands of people have seen it in the first place if Hernandez hadn't talked up her friend on Kotaku?
Sure. For one thing, Quinn had at least that many Twitter followers. It's a game, also, that covers mental illness, which isn't a frequent topic. On that novelty alone, it was likely to get some attention regardless of who Quinn's friends were.
> Would that niche of a title have wound up on the site at all if not for the personal connection between those two?
There's a good chance it would. Depression Quest was novel. Kotaku likes showcasing novel and interesting things.
As someone who has actually worked on creating even a simplistic Zelda-clone, you're fooling yourself if you think it took any real amount of effort.
>written a piece of literature
The entirety of Depression Quest reads like simplistic hipster angst. Similar to "Will You Save Your Son", except at least WYSYS has some self awareness and was meant to mock this type of storytelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSm1Rn7Prcs
Maybe an hours' total of work for a low quality Twine game using a script written during a lunch break.
I think it's generous to even call it "low effort".
Eh, the quality of her game doesn't really matter anyways. It's interactive fiction with some graphics showing - it's hardly Call of Duty, but it does take a lot more than "15 minutes". Quinn is a game developer in the same sense that my gran playing Words With Friends on Facebook is a gamer - both terms still apply, even if casually.
Play around with something like Inform7 or even Twine with the interest of making a full story - it still takes a lot of thought.
Still, having played it, I'm not a fan (and that goes double since I've fought with depression and do not care for her treatment of the material!), and I think it comes off as amateur hour. I think Steam could do a lot better than IF-style "games" in general.
Good point WRT her Twitter following. I had not considered that.
> Using the same tool ZQ used to make her game - it's literally 5-15 minutes online. The effort was next to nil.
Writing something the length of Depression Quest, creating graphics, mapping out the story, quality assurance testing, composing music... this does not take 5 to 15 minutes. It is not nil effort.
If you think it's so easy, please, go ahead and recreate Depression Quest from scratch in 15 minutes.
I'm going to have to apologize. I got DQ mixed up with a different hipster Twine game that I heard of at around the same timeframe. One that was no more than 10 or so panels and 3 lines of dialogue that also garnered a fair amount of attention. I confused the two (and no more than a brief Google search showed me that I had...)
At 40,000~ words + music/still graphics, DQ is a fair chunk of work.
Again, apologies. Definitely more than "next to nil" effort.
When she does it she's a dirty whore, cheating on her partner and exploiting and manipulating men. (and whether actually did this or not is irrelevant, we're going to keep saying she did and supporting that with total bullshit).
If your definition of "networking and growth hacking" means writing positive coverage for people you are friends with and/or financially contribute to while not telling people that, your definitions are broken.
It's not okay. It might even be against FTC rules. Full stop, end of story.
By the way, why are we talking about whether if you do it is okay or not when just one post ago you were calling the (sourced, verified) accusations outright lies?
As to who Zoe did or did not sleep with- kind of irrelevant in the long run, but if you're going to bring up any mention of it as perpetuating a lie, I'm obligated to address that.
Eron, her ex, posted a ton of chatlogs on the original post that started this whole thing (including that stupid "five guys burgers" meme).
It doesn't look like a lie to me. If is, it's the most exhaustively fabricated and backed plot I've seen this side of a crazy soap opera.
I'm not asking you to agree with me, here. I'm asking you to exercise the same dispassionate, critical analysis you'd use on any other topic.
This is an example of a gamergate supporter (you) continuing a pattern of harrassment (perpetuating the copiously debunked lies about Quinn). Repeating the libel is the harrassment.
By the way: HN Notify got to your snarky comment before you did.
The links you gave were interesting, so thanks for that, but I don't appreciate your implication that I was "lying" because you misunderstand a conversation's thread.
You know what other names are tarnished? Liberals, Socialists, Democrats, Conservatives, Republicans, Christians, Muslims, ecologists, feminists, etc. Every sufficiently large movement has had its name dragged through the mud by its opposition. It's how things work. Gamergate is fine and continues to do good, whether the adversaries want to acknowledge it or not.
Gamergate doesn't actually have "ranks", it is a multi-homed, decentralized mob. That is the genius/horror of it. Welcome to the future of memetic warfare, it has already reached escape velocity from 4chan.
It is being continuosly harassed by people who claim they are fighting harassment, that's for sure. But I don't think that such strategy is going to pay off. You can't just yell harassment as means to abuse people into submission. Many have tried similar tactics in the past and it never works in the long run.
I'm sure there are a few civil rights movements that had some nasty issues when they started out. Do we judge based on where one came from or who one is now?
I think I was clear in that I wasn't talking about isolated incidents. comrh wrote "the beginning of the GG movement was mainly a force to harass people", and Karunamon - who has also been defending GG on this thread - agreed.
If a civil rights movement had started for the purpose of doing unacceptable acts, I would definitively judge the people who chose to associate with it. (Of course, I'd excuse a lot from a civil rights movement that I wouldn't excuse from a movement dedicated to fighting bad gaming journalism - regardless of the merits of their claims.)
>Karunamon - who has also been defending GG on this thread - agreed.
I'm not sure why Karunamon agreed, but I largely passed on this point because that is an argument that would only distract from the overall point. I would assume Karunamon wanted to not get mired down in that point as well.
From what I have seen, I would say that it was not founded for that purpose, but there have been bad actors who have been a part of it.
>Of course, I'd excuse a lot from a civil rights movement that I wouldn't excuse from a movement dedicated to fighting bad gaming journalism
What are some behaviors you would excuse from one but not the other?
What are some behaviors you would excuse from one but not the other?
Essential, I apply the right of self-defense to a group much like it does to individuals. The justified intensity of the action is relative to the injury being fought against (up to and including "shooting back").
The ethics of gaming journalism certainly don't deserve more than dispassionate criticism and factual accusations of impropriety.
Self defense is only justified reactively against an immediate threat. Seeking out and attacking someone is never justified as self defense. We are talking about the actions of a movement... deliberate chosen actions. What deliberate chosen actions, not made in reaction to an immediate threat, is justified if the one doing it says it is for the cause of civil rights?
That's the letter of the law, but Sheehan was acquitted by people who have a closer perspective to mine: if the threat is reinforced by past abuses/attacks and there's no expected relief from the authorities, even something deliberate can be self-defence. This can be true for a person, and for a group.
On the contrary, the claim is the truth, and the idea that gamergate is not a harassment campaign is a lie. The original creators of the movement explicitly stated that it was intended to be such, and that 'ethics in game journalism' is a cover story.
Of course, most members of gamergate do not believe they are in a harassment campaign, but why would they? The leaders of the movement will indulge them and tell them what they are doing is just.
This is what I was referring to. Your statement reads like a religious dogma. There is no argument, no proof, no room for nuance. Just an axiom, which should be taken at face value and assimilated into one's set of beliefs. And this is something GG does very often. They build entire mythologies about the movement to paint the movement as some sort of a bogeyman. I think this is beneficial to gamergate. The opponents, with all their propaganda, make themselves appear ridiculous and work hard at discrediting themselves. Gamergaters don't even need to engage in advocacy. They just need to let the anti-GG keep being anti-GG.
> This is what I was referring to. Your statement reads like a religious dogma. There is no argument there, no proof, no room for nuance. Just an axiom, which should be taken at face value and assimilated into one's set of beliefs.
Heh, this site offers as much "proof", as those shady news sites no one has ever heard of which pro-Russian internet trolls use to "prove" that there's no Russian invasion in Eastern Ukraine.
The parallels between the techniques employed by the anti-GG/SJW crowd and those of the Russian state propaganda are uncanny.
Very ironic that you decided to link to that RationalWiki piece, actively edited by the notorious 'Ryulong' who was banned from Wikipedia largely in part by his bad behavior (rule-beaking, undoing edits, bias and unethical practices) on the GamerGate entry. (https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ryulong%20banned)
The people who most influence gamergate, the people who gamergate listen to. They do exist. Gamergate may be decentralised, but like any campaign, it does have leaders.
Well, one example would be Milo Yiannopoulos. A journalist with a murky past (screwing over staff working under him) and who, prior to joining gamergate, actively mocked video gamers.
Could you identify a call-to-action that Milo Yiannopoulos initiated, or any other manifestation of his leadership of GamerGate supporters? Has he started a campaign? Has he organized an event?
They got upset because moot banned any discussion of GamerGate, including journalist conflicts of interest and censorship on other forums around the web. 4chan until then had had very few restrictions on speech. It was very unusual for posts to be removed for mentioning, say, that Kotaku's Nathan Grayson had given favorable coverage to close friends.
A lot of 4chan users will be upset if you do anything. That is too much of a generalization and isn't possible to determine for the community as a whole. Keep in mind the vast majority of 4chan users don't even post.
I'm not saying all of 4chan was upset (I'd imagine many might be quite happy, but kept quiet). Perhaps not even most of 4chan. I just think that's probably the main reason why anyone would call the mods 'SJWs'.
(Though maybe 'SJW mods' is just the new 'fascist mods')
I don't think this is the case at all. Gamergate was noisy and annoying at it's best on 4chan. However, there have been many bans for posts wildly outside of gamergate, that were on SJW talking points.
The reason gamergate was banned from 4chan is they kept posting pics of zoe and moot hanging out at conferences and bars and such.
I'm not sure about the larger picture of the whole internet, but after seeing the fempire spread on reddit and reading some of the ways they did so, I can see why some people jump to it as the default argument.
I think what people tend to get upset about is having their opinions dismissed and smugly described as a harassment campaign. Both sides of that stupid gamergate fiasco had legitimate complaints and both sides had assholes who harassed the other side.
I mean it's pretty easy to see what camp you fall into, and you're basically ascribing a very shallow set of beliefs to an entire group of people - the exact same thing you're accusing that group of doing. Without knowing anything going on with the other side, I could see why people would get upset with that.
Calling it harassment is a huge discredit to a movement that holds very valid criticisms of both these people.
Edit: I should qualify this. Both sides of the issue have their shitshows distorting the debate with harassment and dirty tactics. At its core gamergate is a conflict between cultural authoritarians and libertarians. It is just the beginning of a wider issue, the old guard of the internet, those that believe in freedom of expression without repurcussion vs those who believe that speech on the internet should involve more social responsibility.
There is really no reason why they should not co exist. Gamergate is one of the examples however of what happens when both occupy the same space. Those who are afraid of their space changing vs those who refuse to occupy such spaces.
There's nothing stopping either ideals staying within their own space or creating their own, however the internet is a pressure cooker that inevitavly leads to a game of escalation and one up mansship where no compromise is accepted.
You have fallen into the same trap as both sides in taking the radicals behaviour as typical of the movement as a whole. Well done, you are why we cant have nice things.
Except for a long time it was the movement as a whole. The is why people don't take it seriously, because last year the group stood for picking apart of game dev's sex life.
You missed the part where that was a complete fabrication. Zoe Quinn didn't sleep with game reviewers, and even if she did, those supposed articles never materialised.
He's downplaying it but the failures to disclose personal ties DID exist in many cases. He also references other ethical failings from Kotaku. None of this would have come to light without GamerGate. They regularly make references to pre-existing relationships now.
Note that this is a pretty important statement from Totilo but he makes it in the form of a comment. Many in GamerGate did appreciate him taking some form of responsibility though.
Those goalposts are heavy, aren't they? I mean, that's interesting, but it's completely unrelated to anything related to the coordinated harassment campaign aimed at Zoe Quinn. So what's your point, exactly?
Don't get me wrong: I love you guys. You have made "SJW" a desirable thing to be. I'm just not big on this whole dishonesty kick.
> it's completely unrelated to anything related to the coordinated harassment campaign aimed at Zoe Quinn.
That is my point. GamerGate isn't about harassment, it's about media, censorship, journalism, centralized vs. decentralized control and a bunch of other stuff.
No, it's not. Don't get me wrong: I am certain that you believe that. I am not calling you a liar. But you're wrong. The core of GamerGate is the same bunch of misogynistic tools who have been around for years, occasionally manifesting into a herpetic flare-up somewhere or other before going away again for a while. (They didn't come from 4chan, but they incubated there.) Guys like Milo Yiannopolous don't give a shit about video games, they give a shit about hurting women, and you are useful by proxy. The rhetoric about ethics-in-journalism-etcetera-etcetera sounds nice, and in it you and I can find a bunch to agree with. But it doesn't matter. Because the actions are what matter, and the actions are fucking reprehensible. Please don't insult my intelligence with false equivalencies and but-but-but-both-sides because but-but-but-both-sides is not true. None of the misogynistic toolbags have been chased from their homes, none of them have been confronted with credible threats to their lives and their families. It has not happened. The notion that it has is fictional at its core.
The reason GamerGate functionally evaporated as quickly as it showed up, aside from particularly die-hard members of the useful-idiot troupe, is because most of your fellows went away once Stephen Colbert made fun of you. There's a reason why the influential string-pullers have been saying things like "give up and try again next year". Because they don't care about what you care about. The social credibility went away, and as soon as the social credibility went away that hard core couldn't do what they wanted to do with your help.
In the process of supporting their movement in the hopes that you get something out of it, you are hurting the defenseless. I hope you stop.
I think you're conflating hurting women and fighting feminism. They are not the same thing. I'm not a feminist but that doesn't mean I'm a misogynist. It just means I don't agree with the tactics and politics employed by feminists (as a political group). I can't speak for everyone in GG, but I think my opinion is shared with others.
> None of the misogynistic toolbags have been chased from their homes, none of them have been confronted with credible threats to their lives and their families. It has not happened. The notion that it has is fictional at its core.
No one has had this happen to them. No one has been arrested on either side of GamerGate. There's no "credible threat" to anyone involved. The fiction you say exists on GG is evident in your own argument as well. No one is credibly being threatened.
I'm not conflating anything. I know the hard core of your movement. They are not new people to me. Their agendas are not hidden--and they're not even hidden within the noxious little vortex that you're chilling in, you just don't want to see it. Spend a little time amongst your buds where they think nobody's looking, like 8chan, and you'll get it. (Oh, but they're not "the real GamerGate", I am always assured. Except that they're the straw that actually stirs the drink...because the rest are useful idiots.)
And for reals, nobody has had this happen? I've had a friend crash on my couch after your fellow travelers have doxxed her, emailed her pictures of her house, and said that they'd come to her house and "slit [her] throat like a pig." So you can turn this sideways and insert it back where it belongs.
I'm not sure which boogeyman you're fighting but since you're talking to me all I can say is that I've never threatened anyone and never would (shouldn't even need to be said).
Honestly, your condescending tone, immaturity and personal attacks are things I can't get on-board with. Being righteously indignant doesn't help you make your case.
Yes, I am righteously indignant. It is a fitting response to the sort of banal cruelty that permits evil to fester in its name. You have adopted as your fellow travelers people who use you to execute their openly misogynistic agendas and you have insulated yourself within their epistemic closure to avoid answering to the fallout of what the people you help have done. Your "but I'd never do that" is thus irrelevant and frankly just sad, because giving cover to monsters makes you culpable.
You choose, with open eyes and of free will, to help people hurt the defenseless, to hurt my friends. I can point at the people you hurt. They exist, in a way the shadows of fearful minds just don't. You are being a bad person. You should stop. But you won't, because to acknowledge one's own wrongdoings requires a sternness of character that is missing in some quarters of the human race, and no small amount of my own anger is at myself for believing I can change those who are too happy to be comfortable in their positions of power.
No neither I nor my friends had anything to do with your friend. Stop making blanket accusations toward people who have nothing to do with your friend's drama.
Edit: You keep editing your reply, but the fact of the matter is no one has been hurt. You keep repeating it like fact but there is no harassment. There's a NARRATIVE that says gamers harass people but that's the whole point of GG, the media is spinning this stuff out of whole cloth.
If what you said about your friend was true, surely you called the police? I would hope so. Since there's been no arrests or police activity related to GG, it's safe to say what you're saying is made up or the police didn't actually find it credible.
It's you that needs to open your eyes. You're being taken for a ride and you're supporting an authoritarian view point and censorship along the way.
>None of the misogynistic toolbags have been chased from their homes, none of them have been confronted with credible threats to their lives and their families. It has not happened. The notion that it has is fictional at its core.
Going to stop you here. [0] A prominent member of #GG was doxed and fearing for her children she took a hiatus from the internet/movement altogether. She's also received several lovely pictures of her face covered in semen and was constantly harassed for being a prominent part of Gamergate.
However unlike you and people like you being so quick to assign fault to GG for anything bad that happens to you, she didn't give fault to the anti-GG side, but rather the individual who did it.
exstudent2 made some really good points and you just answer it like an invocation in the church.
Seriously, we're not in the church here. It seems like a sensible matter to you and you seem angry, which will change nothing. So take a deep breath and go out to change your mind. There's nothing to win in this conversation and we will all be at the same place tomorrow. Take a break.
You can keep saying that but it has a long, well documented history of harassment. It might be about those other things too but I strongly feel that name has been poisoned beyond recovery.
> None of this would have come to light without GamerGate.
Including the stuff in his comment that happened before GamerGate and was widely known about and reported on before GamerGate?
"None of this" indeed.
Oh, and Totilo doesn't describe any kind of compromising relationship between Quinn and any of his writers, which merely underscores the fundamentally dishonest basis of the entire "movement". "ethics in games journalism" was always a pretext for "attack Zoe Quinn", which is why you idiots continue to bitch about "oh gosh someone in the games industry knows someone else" and not, you know, "major games publishers won't deal with critical outlets" or "major games publishers try to break through the Chinese wall between editorial and advertising by holding outlets hostage" or "non-disclosure of advertising funded by major publishers is routine on YouTube" or "the games industry is fundamentally corrupted by the widespread use of pre-orders rendering titles immune to reviews or even basic quality control" or "major publishers routinely use death marches, even though this is detrimental to both game quality and programmer wellbeing" or all sorts of other issues that actually matter worth a damn.
But no, you keep harping on about the utterly fucking trivial indie games industry, if it can even be called that.
> But no, you keep harping on about the utterly fucking trivial indie games industry
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, and your comments are generally breaking the site guidelines about civility. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly.
(Many other commenters have been breaking the guidelines too in this thread, and I'm not posting this because I agree with any of them.)
You should write about all the problems with major game publishers and name names. It would be a great article! However, considering how most game sites circled the wagons for the case of Nathan Grayson and an unknown indie dev, I don't have high hopes.
Also, saying there was no conflict of interest between Grayson and Quinn is bunk. He had hung out with her, flirted online, planned a trip to Vegas with her, and been thanked in the credits of Quinn's game. A journalist outside of the games industry would have let someone else cover the Game Jam, given that level of involvement.
Quinn should be blameless in this - there's no handbook of ethics for indie devs - but Stephen Totilo absolutely shouldn't.
> and generally act like you're throwing a tantrum
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, and your comments are generally breaking the guidelines about civility. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly.
(Many other commenters have been breaking the guidelines too in this thread, and I'm not posting this because I agree with any of them.)
Journalists are allowed to have an agenda. There is no such thing as an unbiased journalist. Even the mere selection of _which stories to write about_ is an expression of bias, as there is no universally agreed upon objective standard of newsworthiness.
Having an agenda does not make me an unethical journalist. Nor does writing things that you do not like on an online message board. Try harder. Here's everything I've written in a professional capacity: http://arstechnica.com/author/peter-bright/. Which of these acts of journalism are unethical, and why?
You're constantly on the front lines of this debate pushing for more leniency for journalists. You are anti-audience in that respect and yes I consider that unethical. You can have any agenda you wish but when that agenda hurts your readership's trust in you, it seems strange to continue to push it.
I don't think I've engaged with gators for several months.
> on the front lines of this debate
[citation needed]
I have been at best a minor footnote in the entire debacle.
> pushing for more leniency for journalists.
[citation needed]
I'm all for ethical journalism. But that is not a call for "objectivity" as I do not believe that journalism can be objective, nor is it a call for removal of "opinion" from both news and reviews.
> You are anti-audience in that respect
Did you consider that perhaps gators are not my audience?
> and yes I consider that unethical.
Writing for different audiences is _unethical_? Do words even have meaning in your world?
> You can have any agenda you wish but when that agenda hurts your readership's trust in you, it seems strange to continue to push it.
Did you never consider that your views do not in fact constitute the consensus opinion of my readership? If I were to lie to my readers and maintain a pro-gamergate persona, I daresay it would hurt my readers' trust in me far more than my current position.
I'm still waiting for you to list all the unethical things I have done. You know: stuff that, for example, demonstrates a conflict of interest or a deliberate misrepresentation of facts. Something that's an actual journalistic ethics issue. I mean, you were so very quick to claim that I was an unethical journalist. Can you not even substantiate the claim?
> Oh, and Totilo doesn't describe any kind of compromising relationship between Quinn and any of his writers,
But action was required on Kotaku's behalf because they weren't acting ethically. Here's another Totilo statement about how Kotaku messed up: https://archive.is/fL71k
He does admit wrongdoing. You're straight up saying he doesn't. How is that ethical?
> you idiots continue to bitch about "oh gosh someone in the games industry knows someone else"
That you find people's concern over undisclosed relationships in reporting something worthy of mockery is appalling and quite frankly all the evidence needed to show you're out to push an agenda that requires overlooking a very traditional staple of journalistic integrity.
> But action was required on Kotaku's behalf because they weren't acting ethically. Here's another Totilo statement about how Kotaku messed up: https://archive.is/fL71k
What the fuck does that have to do with Quinn? Oh right: nothing.
> That you find people's concern over undisclosed relationships in reporting something worthy of mockery is appalling and quite frankly all the evidence needed to show you're out to push an agenda that requires overlooking a very traditional staple of journalistic integrity.
That you find it remarkable or notable that people who write about games know people who make games shows that you have very little understanding of the trade press. "I know this person" is not a relationship that needs disclosure.
There's no clear consensus on things like Kickstarter, by the way. While investment would be a clear ethical breach, Kickstarter is--by law--not an investment. Kickstarter backers are not acquiring any kind of stake in the company. There's no clear journalistic rule that would, for example, prohibit backing Kickstarters but still permit preordering games (and I've never once seen a gator demand that game preorders be disclosed).
Similarly, the distinction between, for example, making payments through Patreon, subscribing to a game such as WoW, or buying a DLC season pass is quite subtle, and there are no universally agreed, widely established rules on what is and isn't acceptable. This is a matter primarily of personal taste, not hard-and-fast rules.
In any case, _none of this supports your claim that I am an unethical journalist_. I've linked you to a page that should (assuming our CMS is working correctly) list every single article I have written. Which of those pieces is unethical, and why?
> Did you consider that perhaps gators are not my audience?
Moreover, did he consider that sometimes journalists should say things that the audience does not reflexively and unthinkingly agree with?
I mean, jeez, I disagree with you approximately all of the time, but that's because I'm right and you're wrong--err, because we come at this from different places and have different priors, that doesn't mean you're hisssssss anti-audience hissssssss.
The fixation on media telling them what they want to hear, regardless of any sort of truth or honesty behind it, and the drive to retaliate against people with the temerity to have an opinion that is not completely complimentary to straight white men is probably the worst part of this whole cancerous mess.
The "examples" that were wholly false from the jump, the ones that depend on things that can be empirically demonstrated to not exist? Those ones?
I've met Quinn a few times and I don't personally care for her, but the monstrous behavior of the children afraid that the games that sell bonkers numbers of copies will go away forever because a few feminists criticize them is so incredibly evil (while also managing to be so, so stupid) that I can only laugh.
Yes, it was probably partly backlash against the way skepticism of feminism is treated by much of the media as either heresy or misogyny.
And with everything that happens online, there's thousands of people on either side, throwing mud at a small number of targets. An internet famous person gets treated like a politician or celebrity, without the benefits (and without necessarily having signed up to it).
And as with anything 4chan gets involved in, there was some pretty nasty trolling.
The start of it, sure. This is all public record at this point.
Judging what exists now by what existed over a year ago is hardly fair. People who actually harass people are now loudly shouted down wherever they're seen doing it.
That comic, in turn, is just another efficient mechanism for evading criticism instead of answering it: as if the number of people making a criticism, whether large or small, has any connection to how valid the critique is. If someone was making racist remarks in a public venue and got a lot of angry pushback, would you dismiss that as "sealioning" too?
A fun exercise: Compare the definition of "sea lioning" with basic conflict resolution tactics. Then, try to explain how they're substantively different.
Frankly, and this is not specific to GG, but I don't get why would one join a movement if one disapproves of how it got started. If one doesn’t want to be associated with assholes, maybe one shouldn't associate themselves with asshole-created groups.
A lot of people joined GG because there is/was no alternative for people who held views opposed to those in the mainstream. It's one of the only groups fighting for unmitigated free speech on the internet. It's made for some strange bedfellows but in the end it's an anti-censorship campaign (that happens to have identified the group pushing for censorship).
From what I've seen, they only seem to be fighting for free speech that agrees with their perspective. See, for example, the campaigns to convince advertisers to pull their ads from sites that publish articles they don't like.
Free speech != profitable speech. The journalists can say whatever they want. If they want to make a profit doing it selling to an audience they're simultaneously beating up, they'll have to deal with the antagonistic relationship they created.
This reminds me of attempts to discredit planned parenthood by pointing out the views of some of the founders. Even if it is true, should something be judged based on where it came from instead of what it currently is?
It gives further evidence to any claim they have changed, but that is only relevant if you are doubting their claim to not be what they were accused of being (if they ever even were that to begin with).
4chan has an extremely non-SJW tilt. I wouldn't be surprised if the SJW term itself originated there as a pejorative.
The site's founder, moot, had to cut all ties with the site as it turned into an angry mob. It's no longer a fun and happy place, there's an undercurrent of hate, fear, and misogyny.
To an extent, yes. However that doesn't change the fact that some of the mods are backing SJW causes, and banning because of it. They blew off gamergate because of all their noisy crap, in spite of the important things they were pushing for. /r/kotakuinaction has much of this information in the "best" post listing.
The whole property is poisoned. The mods are incapable of keeping a lid on the problem.
This is the same phenomenon that played out at Reddit where the leadership was hesitant to try and interfere with so-called free-speech issues, and would then wildly over-react when things came to a head.
The problem is that 4chan's tone has turned from "social justice", those incidents early in its history where people were genuinely trying to help others as internet vigilantes, to those that started antagonizing people, and later, to viciously harassing them.
A lot of people who wanted no part of that have left. This skews the community heavily towards those who don't leave, who enjoy that sort of thing.
I'm not saying all participants in 4chan are guilty, but the nature of that entity, as a whole, is the polar opposite of SJW.
I don't see an alternative term available that expresses the same meaning. I don't use it as a pejorative intentionally, just as a term for people who believe things like minorities can't be racist.
Sweet sweet irony.