Why #gamergate is bullshit

From a storify of Zoe Quinn’s tweets on her observation of 4chan:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bw1oRgMCIAAIMB9.png:large

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Whoa.
None of the times I have been cheated on did I ever feel the urge to facebook it. That’s gross.
I mean, sure, talking about one’s feelings and letting people know you’re hurt. That’s one thing. But publicly or semi-publicly vilifying a person? Nah.
I also most certainly never warned my friends. I am personally still friends with one ex that cheated on me and one of the women he cheated on me with. He’s a great guy, because I have good taste and she’s a great lady, because he does. I don’t see why anyone needs to name and shame people just because their relationship didn’t win out against their partner’s libido.
Drop them or don’t, let your friends comfort you and move on with your life like an adult.
Do not write an epos of a blog post that you crosspost to every possible site you know to get attention from complete strangers. And that was just the FIRST thing he did. I have no sympathy for that guy.

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Someone gets cheated on and they encourage their friends to harass, hunt down, and threaten the person that cheated on them by ranting about it online in multiple forums desperate for attention? Yes. What a colossal, unmitigated douchebag. What a fucking asshole. What a sad little child.

Look, you can justify your apparent douchebaggery however you’d like, but it’s still douchebaggery. I’ve been a COLOSSAL douchebag in my life, too. It’s a thing that happens. We move on and become better people.

Or, I guess, we pretend like we weren’t douchebags and struggle to excuse our actions and keep being a douchebag because we feel entitled to it or are incapable of admitting our flaws.

But only one of those actions is recommended for future peace and happiness.

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In addition to what @kramski says about posting on facebook and blogs, Gjoni has been doing the most obnoxious pseudo-white-knighting of himself by making token efforts to be against the controversy he stirred up while being entrenched in the deepest depths of it. He posted a short “whoops this has gone beyond what I wanted” on his blog but left it completely open and exposed anyways, he chastised people in a /v/ IRC while having no business being there other than to read about the attention he was getting, etc.

[quote=“clifyt, post:31, topic:41770”]
Just curious, where do you draw the line about what you can or cannot talk about? If the guy hit you? Could you talk about it? What about stole your identity and racked up $100k in damages?
[/quote]Those are times to talk to the police, not facebook. Where are you priorities?

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[quote=“clifyt, post:34, topic:41770”]
Oh, I think one can do both!
[/quote]But why? I’m not even old, I just will never understand this social media mindset.

Like right now.

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I always try to blame those who are trying to excuse their behavior by playing at being a martyr. Call it a bias.

Victims have had something done TO THEM. When that victim then turns around and does something to someone else, they’re a victimizer, and deserve to be called on that. It’s a cycle, and a pretty well-documented one at that, where people who have been treated like shit go on to treat others like shit and the only way to stop that cycle is to try and not treat other people like shit, even if you think they deserve it.

Not really ashamed of saying that people who treat others like shit should feel bad about it, regardless of their tired excuses. I blame Catholic school and that “turn the other cheek” thing they kept going on about. Surprisingly useful and effective advice, even if all the woo woo jesus magic turned out to be over-sold.

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Yeah, as that last paragraph mentions, the supreme irony in all this is that there’s this long history of game publishers cozying up to journalists in really obvious ways - not just the outright payola, but the common practice of lavish parties and events held by game companies for reporters. Absolutely staggering amounts of money are spent by game publishers and development studios to curry favor with games journalists, with the dividing line between marketing and covering games being pretty much non-existent. Game companies routinely count on the fact that they can turn to reporters for boosterism for their company and products. All the whooping and cheering at E3, which is purely a press event, is a dead giveaway as to the complete and total lack of journalistic detachment by so many people covering games. As games journalism has made some (uneven) efforts to be more professional, the growing importance of Youtube players to review games has made things worse - they don’t even have a pretense of journalistic ethics, and it’s becoming common for them to sell their attention. They don’t see anything wrong with it because that’s more or less how it’s always been in the game industry.
So that “gamers” are flipping their shit over a “scandal” that never even happened show how much this isn’t about corruption, but about a game developer simply being female.

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No, he tried to socially isolate his friend who slept with her.

Generally speaking, telling people your GF likes to sleep around isn’t going to isolate her socially. If anything it will make her more popular.

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They probably should, but it’s not your job to make them feel bad. That’s on them. Either they do or do not. You are not other peoples’ morality police.

Plus, for all we know, you, me, this Eron Gjoni asshole – we all deserved to be cheated on.

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I’d really disagree with that. One scenario I imagine I’d be fine with cheating is if your SO is the kind of asshole who would try and rile up the Internet to come get you if you left him.

100% with you here.

…but this seems to ignore reality, and somehow puts being cheated on as a worse consequence than going to jail.

Speaking as someone who has been cheated on…this is a priority that is wildly out of whack.

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Cheating, sex, favors, imagined events. Yup, sounds like it’s either high school or the latest MTV reality show.

Anyone ready to expound their gamergate theory at length could probably do with a few hours in the park relaxing.

There is misogyny in gaming and most other industries. It sucks. It should stop. Learn what companies have the problem, never buy their product, and don’t associate with those who do. make sure they know why. That will probably do more than tldr rants or people with developmental disorders trying to slut shame someone they’ve never met.

Man, I got to go to the park.

“Clickbait” headlines are a pretty well defined genre. Wait, is genre the right word?

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I’m not quite sure that you have a full grasp on what exactly it was that Eron Gjoni did at the start of all this (you don’t seem to understand that he sought openly public dispersal of a message containing questionable information). So to clear that up for you, here’s a quote from another Cracked article. This one was written by Zoe Quinn, and it’s titled “5 Things I Learned as the Internet’s Most Hated Person”

In my case, I was at a bar with friends when I first caught a whiff of the impending shitstorm. We were having birthday drinks when someone reached out to tell me that my ex had written a screed about our relationship that had been posted to a forum I belong to. Slowly, horrifically, we discovered that he had posted it to several other popular forums (that had immediately nuked it) and created a Wordpress blog that was literally nothing but his 10,000-word rant about our failed relationship. Shortly after that, we found Wikipedia edits on my page that had altered my date of death to coincide with planned public appearances (or, in one case, simply “soon”).

. . . and it goes on from there . . . that’s just the start of it. Give it a read - and notice how kind she is to the person who totally tore apart her life.

This was not simply a guy posting a whine session to his friends on social media. This was a directed, aggressive, abusive attack. At one point Zoe Quinn had to explain to her father why he’d received a call screaming “You’re daughter’s a whore!” and then hanging up, and that was before the rape threats started.

I guess it’s time for me to also chime in and mention that in all of this, Eron Gjoni never took down his original post on the blog that contains only his diatribe. If he’d truly wanted the attacks to stop, that’s where a plea for them to stop would exist - with nothing else. He is no victim.

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“Clickbait” fans have a serious dislike for the term “genre headlines.” Call it what it is, as long as you don’t abbreviate it to “CliBa” or “ClyBy”. Sheesh.

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Nah, you may be viewing this as a sort of competition, if people agree with a post that doesn’t agree with you, then click on the heart icon just below it, it does not mean your point is invalid.
At most, it might mean that other people, (who are not you, are not connected to you, are not extensions of you) believe something different.

That this bothers you is not even wrong, but its hardly personal unless you make it personal.

Like here.

Are you missing the part about how they were on a break when the alleged cheating happened? On a break means… well, on a break. So this guy wrote this 8,000 words rant when the relationship wasn’t active and (most likely, given what happened next) finishing.

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That’s probably because the normal, sane response to cheating is not to make every attempt to make sure that every person who might ever have contact with that person in their personal or professional life knows all the juicy details of what they did, and post information about that person in forums with histories of attacking the professional and private lives of people their members view as ‘bad’.

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I find it interesting that the actual full sentence from the article reads this way:

“I made the mistake of dating a guy who would later go on to write a several-act manifesto about my alleged sex life and post it to every forum he could create a handle for.” (my bold)

I included the bold face because that manifesto has proven to be less-than-kosher. You also chose to edit out the fact that her point was that her ex had inappropriately decided to air their personal life on “every forum he could create a handle for”.

@gadgetgirl02 got posted first. They were supposedly on a break at the time, so no cheating occurred. You just want it soooo much to be the case.

This is what started a furious rabid mob against a woman. I’m talking about rape and death threats. The fact that you are defending it AT ALL is, IMO - repulsive. There’s no excuse for what he did.

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Many people would say that life is too short to continue being angry at someone who is no longer a part of your life. You have described a situation where an ugly break up spiraled out into a circle of friends. I don’t agree with Daedalus that you were a douchebag for telling your side of the story. (Though I think when looking back on things like this it’s worth reflecting honestly on whether it was us, in fact, who was being an asshole)

But Eron Gjoni did not tell his story to friends. I would not even know his name had he not done this, so he didn’t really need to defend himself to me. He knew that writing what he wrote would cause people completely unconnected to their situation to harass and threaten her and he did it anyway. When people deleted his rant from forums he made his own site to host it because he couldn’t take the hint that the community of his peers didn’t find it appropriate.

I’m going to guess you haven’t spent time in prison. It’s worse than being cheated on.

The logic of your statement is that if an abusive maniac is threatening and attacking their partner then their partner owes them a nice sit-down “it’s over” chat before moving on with someone else. There is a lot more to human relationships than who has sex with who, and who has sex with who does not trump all other behaviour.

From your comments here it sounds like you were in a very bad relationship where you were hurt very badly, by someone who was really, really awful to you. But there is a lot of variance in relationships out there.

But, finally, I’d like to say:

I can’t imagine at all why I would think half of what he said was true. With no other information about anything, it is just as plausible that is just a raging asshole making things up to try to hurt his ex because she dumped him. But since we do have other information (for example, the review that she supposedly got for sleeping with someone definitely didn’t happen) I would say it is far more plausible that he is just a angry, lying, asshole ex-boyfriend than “half of what he is saying is true.” You know that people tell lies to hurt other people. We all know this guy has told lies to hurt his ex. There’s no reason to think he’s even telling half truths.

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