To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.
I think this is more about us all being on platforms that value engagement and simply don't care if that "engagement" is people fighting with each other. The Internet always had whackjobs... in fact on a per capita basis I'd bet that in the early days we're praising as "we all got along" the whackjob ratio was higher than it is today and it has since regressed to the norm... but the systems structurally tended to discourage the nastiness. There was still plenty of it, but on Usenet, you could add the guy who enraged you to the point of blinding rage to your ignore file... and you could add the two guys who refuse to ignore each other to your own ignore file. In the Weblog space you could just, you know, not read that other blog that infuriates you. On custom forums the community was small and tended to evict people.
It was not paradise. But it was more workable, when the platforms weren't designed by PhDs to seek out and exploit your outrage for their ad clicks.
Yeah, seems like the whackjobs became a lot more visible.
ejecting jerks is something forums did better than social media, even if the definition of jerk varied widely and was forum-specific. I can't imagine a forum doing something like promoting the user with the most interacted with posts; they'd probably lock the thread and consider banning
And if you did that now you'd probably have no forum left because everyone has been trained to generate engagement.
Has it been tried?
I mean, it is a common moderation goal, in physical meetings, to make sure the silent ones gets heard.
Could be interesting to try a social network approach om those terms: promotion inversely correlated with engagement.
The undercurrent here for me is barriers to entry and monopolies and network-effects, ex:
Con: You had to search to find a community.
Pro: There were lots of independent communities that had competition in case one was badly moderated.
The leaked Epstein files have revealed that the GamerGate "outrage" was largely astroturfed[1]. It was one of the first large-scale experiments run and observed by people like Steve Bannon, Jeffery Epstein and Peter Thiel on how "flood the zone" with outrage and contradictory information, allowing people to be manipulated for political gain.
[1]: https://clownworld.news/epstein-gamergate-chan-culture
Gamergate was definitely an inflection point, though my opinion on it has changed throughout the years. I think it was the first internet squabble where throwing around accusations of "isms" became a common tactic. And in defense of what? "Gaming journalism" is as bad as it's ever been. There's a real "access media" problem in the industry as well as a laser focus on social issues at the expense of almost everything else. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of hype (wo)men for large games publishers. I wish we could get the kind of cutting, acerbic game criticism that Pitchfork delivered for music in the early 2000s - the medium would be better for it.
I struggle to believe that it had anything to do with "Gaming journalism". I tried several times to figure out what the big deal was, and each time left with the impression that it was really just a bunch of antisocial misogynists who wanted a hate figure.
Like, then and now I do get the impression that there's very little in the way of real "journalism" going on in gaming, but that seemed like just a weird non-sequitur people would trot out as a fig leaf for all the vileness whenever confronted about it.
It was pretty obvious to anyone following along that the concern about the integrity of "gaming journalism" was a phony pretext.
That’s not how I interpret gamergate. Actually I view gamergate as the staging post for MAGA and Trump getting elected.
It was a great trial run for flooding the zone with lies and outrage to defeat progressives. It worked then and continues to work.
This is documented even. Steve Bannon is directly quoted talking about leveraging gamergate as a new way to flood the zone, and as a conversion pipeline for young men to the alt right and maga politics.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddi...
At the time it was happening I recall thinking "This should be a typical flair up that'll die down to smolders in a couple of weeks and life will continue" as so many dicey internet things had done in the past but that time there was something that kept that fire burning, it wasn't organic feeling, it was as if it was hooked up to life support just to stoke more engagement and stronger, more subtlety incompatible opinions.
It worked, we collectively fell for it hook, line, and sinker. It keeps working. It will likely keep working for a long time as people continue to feel empowered by self-entrenchment and the want for affirmation that they're on the right side of history.
Wasn't there also some connection between Gamergate and Jeffrey Epstein I remember reading about?
Mostly through Steve Bannon as far as I'm aware, yes. Though apparently there were connections through moot, and later Peter Thiel adjacency as well.
https://www.garbageday.email/p/here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-...
I think you're both right. It was around that time that internet and real-life culture started fusing together increasingly. Internet became more political, including in the tactics used, real life became /b/, even the president is an internet troll. When everyone is on the internet, all of a sudden our socioeconomic and political differences are magnified and the narcissists and sadists have a never ending feeding-trough.
Yeah i feel like that was one of the first times regular people out in the real world really tangled with hardcore internet trolls. I think it was a shock to both to have their territories invaded by the other.
Yeah, whatever pretenses gamergate started with, they got brushed aside pretty quickly in favor of right wing outrage politics. The beginning issue (games journalism being a big club of hollywood wanabes supported by corporate bootlicking) was quickly turned into an angry mob of misogyny and anti-intellectualism.
Around 2015-16 the same stategy was deployed to mainstream politics, which is when I feel internet culture truly died for good. Social media went from a pastime to an engine that fueled real world events.
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Like Chuck Norris, chuds don't sleep. They wait.
You were never on 4chan before that I guess?