Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[hyzmarca]

If I write a 2000 word BDSM shortstory and publish it via Amazon's Kindle for 99 cents, about how many sales can I expect in a month?

[name_here]

No one has any idea whatsoever. Especially not publishers.

[Prak]

The Den's kink-oriented members should start compiling data on this subject.

[hyzmarca]

Someone was offering 2 dollars to write a 2000 word fetish story on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I took it, got a quarter of the way through, and then realized that I was developing brand new IP and this guy was expecting my to hand over all the rights to him for a tenth of a cent per word and a promise of more jobs that might pay more and fuck that.

I figure that if I finish it up and publish it at the 99 cent pricetag I'll probably make more than 2 dollars in royalties. If I'm lucky, I can build a whole franchise off of it.

[Prak]

I would imagine that the number of people you'd need to buy it to make more than what the guy was offering is in the single--maybe low double--digits. So why the hell not.

[hyzmarca]

Amazon's royalty for Kindle sales is either a flat 35 percent or 70 percent of the price minus delivery costs.

Of course, the delivery costs are priced at 15 cents per megabyte, which would suggest that Amazon is paying 150 USD per gigabyte of upload, which I'd presume isn't.

But it two housand words that less than a penny. So it beats two dollars in three sales.

Assuming that it makes three sales, which isn't guaranteed.

[Prak]

True, but $.99 is impulse purchase money, so there's a decent likelihood that you could get those three sales.. let's say eventually, possibly even within a year. If you go on Reddit and pimp it even modestly, you could get there sooner most likely.

[Mistborn]

So I've spent the past day reading stuff about Gamergate and to be honest I feel like I understand the issue less now. The actually people whose blogs I've read seem like eminately reasonable people with legitimate grievances, but most of the media sources I consider respectable claim that the movement is just backlash against women in gaming and their arguements also look reasonable. Meanwhile most of the non-blog pro-gamergate media I've found comes from places like shady conservative sources or some woman from the American Enterprise institute.

Can someone explain to me what the hell is going on?

[Ancient History]

The tl;dr version is:

0) The whole thing started because one asshat accused his ex-girlfriend of giving good reviews of the game made by the guy she was currently fucking.

1) Video games, the video game industry, and video game culture tend to be male-dominated.

2) Video game journalism is almost notoriously corrupt.

3) A bunch of douchebags started harassing female video game journalists or women that pointed out that the asshat in 0) was being a misogynist dick.

4) So you have three kinds of people screaming at each other - the ones that are trying to make an argument about journalistic ethics ("Yo, it's not cool to give a good review to the guy you're fucking."), people talking about how misogynist video games/the industry/culture is, and the fucking asshats that are out there posting terrible derogatory stuff about women and posting their personal information and attacks everywhere.

5) The reason you're confused is because the journalist ethics group and the douchebag-hating-on-women group have a large crossover segment.

[schpeelah]

The tl;dr version is:

0) The whole thing started because one asshat accused his ex-girlfriend of giving good reviews of the game made by the guy she was currently fucking.

You got that mixed up. The girlfriend made a game and was accused of fucking the reviewers.

[name_here]

Actually, she was accused of fucking people who review games. The people she was accused of fucking did not in fact review her game. Apparently they did mention her in one of those "here's what we saw at a big media event" articles, but the guy who made the accusation has specifically said that happened earlier.

It's worth noting, though, that ethics in video game reviews are fucked and so broader journalistic integrity accusations are generally true. It's just that I question the motives of anyone who hasn't been talking about that for a while.

[Kaelik]

Yeah I think a huge part of the problem at this point is that now any time someone says literally anything about game journalism they are immediately called a misogynist.

If people could tell the difference between misogynists who don't care about game journalism, and people who care about game journalism but aren't misogynists, that would help both causes, by preventing misogynists hiding behind journalism concerns and by letting people talk about journalism without being called misogynists.

My favorite was an article that was 100% about how gamersgate is a movement of misogynists and absolutely not a single person who uses the hashtag cares about gaming journalism. And their one and only arguments was "look at this one incident when someone threatened to kill Anita Sarkeesian, even though that person didn't reference gamersgate in any way, and Anita was going to give a speech also unrelated to gamersgate."

[DSMatticus]

So I've spent the past day reading stuff about Gamergate and to be honest I feel like I understand the issue less now. The actually people whose blogs I've read seem like eminately reasonable people with legitimate grievances, but most of the media sources I consider respectable claim that the movement is just backlash against women in gaming and their arguements also look reasonable. Meanwhile most of the non-blog pro-gamergate media I've found comes from places like shady conservative sources or some woman from the American Enterprise institute.

Can someone explain to me what the hell is going on?

What eerie deja vua.

How GamerGate Became A Thing
Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, made a blog accusing her of cheating on him and being an all around terrible person, and also sleeping with people on the journalist side of the industry who worked at outfits which had reviewed her game, Depression Quest. At this point, it was really nothing more than a bunch of gossip about a terrible breakup and fairly shaky allegations of minor corruption.

Then Zoe Quinn did something very shady and very stupid. She contacted the hosting providers of a couple small videogame blogging outlets discussing Eron Gjoni's allegations and demanded that those articles be taken down, which they were. Similarly, a video by some minor youtube nobody named MundaneMatt covering the topic got taken down with a false and malicious DMCA claim in Zoe Quinn's name.

This prompted a response by major youtube somebody TotalBiscuit, who has previous experience with false and malicious DMCA claims when the company behind Day One: Garry's Incident DMCA'd his review for being too negative. He won that battle. He made a twitlonger post boiling down to "I'm staying the fuck out of this because I have no idea how to sort the bullshit from the facts, but if that really was Zoe Quinn who had that video taken down (and it may not have been, because Youtube's systems are terrible) then I thoroughly condemn her. Abusing IP law to censor people is unethical. It's also stupid, because of the Barbara Streisand effect."

Two things happened in response. The first is that a bunch of Zoe Quinn's supporters in the industry started a twitter lynch mob after TotalBiscuit's head. Not really kidding. The bold opinion that "censorship bad" earned him the scorn of the developer and journalist community. You had people unironically threatening him with DMCA claims for reviewing their games and calling him a misogynist shitbag and Phil Fish got so angry he quit video games for the bajillionth time.

The second is that TotalBiscuit's twitlonger post got featured on gaming subreddits and drew a fuckton of discussion. Then, Zoe Quinn did another very shady and stupid thing; she went to the reddit admins and told them "make reddit stop talking about me." The reddit admins went to the mods for those subreddits and told them "make people stop talking about Zoe Quinn or you're gone." And so in a pretty fucking hilarious twist, tens of thousands of comments about TotalBiscuit's twitlonger post about censorship got censored.

The Media Response Is Bullshit
At this point, there are obviously very legitimate positions to have that make you a GGer. For one, if you don't believe in using false and malicious DMCA claims to silence people saying mean things about you, then you could respectably count yourself in the GG camp. But at the same time, this controversy has a lot of appeal to MRA assholes and anti-SJW shitstains, because Zoe Quinn is a woman and "one of them there damn ess-jay-dubyas!" That's what brought Adam Baldwin aboard, who dubbed it GamerGate. Adam Baldwin would fit in well at my extended family gatherings, which means he's the kind of person that it should be legal to spit in the face of. And as you've seen, a bunch of other web-type conservative media picked it up and ran with it in the "fuck the left! Let's all go back to treating women and minorities as property, am I right?" direction. Fucking hell. But I'm not going to talk about those people, because they are so obviously in the wrong I don't think it needs explained.

Instead, I want to talk about the media response by journalists inside the video game industry. Once they realized that Zoe Quinn's censorship campaign had exploded this into a massive thing, they shifted gears; within the span of about two days, more than a dozen articles were published by different writers at different websites which all said basically exactly the same thing; these pesky gamers are basement-dwelling misogynistic straight white male nerds and you shouldn't listen to anything they have to say, especially not about Zoe Quinn. They were fucking smear pieces. They were transparent and obvious smear pieces. And they pissed a lot of people off. They definitely backfired, and for a while the GamerGate crowd went after these websites' funding in the form of consumer complaints to advertisers with moderate success.

But unfortunately, the GamerGate side of things never really got their hands on a megaphone to talk to the public with. It was a lot like what happened to Occupy Wall Street on Fox News; you have a fuckton of fairly disorganized people on the ground calling bullshit in broad protest, but the media just fucking will not let them be heard. Instead, it's nothing but blackout and cherry-picked examples to make them look bad. So instead of talking about TotalBiscuit and the tons of people pissed off about censorship, they chose to talk about the handful of completely random assholes on twitter sending deaththreats. And they did that over, and over, and over, and over for about two months until it hit mainstream news, like CNN. And their coverage of GamerGate was "here's Anita Sarkeesian. She is a woman. She talks about videogames. She gets death threats. GamerGate is a thing. Make of this what you will."

The Aftermath
As a feminist, GamerGate was fucking depressing as shit. Not because I had to watch portions of an internet mob make internet threats at women (yes, that is genuinely awful), but because I had to watch a bunch of fucking assholes defend a shitty person and their own worthless careers by using the feminist label like a bludgeon and smearing their detractors as misogynists and they won. A bunch of shitstain "feminists" stood up in public and acted like the parodies conservatives pretend all feminists are, and they survived the public backlash long enough that they'll get to do it again.

As for professional corruption, well; what spells corruption better than a media blackout to defend one of your own from allegations of illegal use of the DMCA to censor critics?

[name_here]

See, I seriously don't fucking believe Zoe Quinn can get Reddit to stop talking about her just by asking. Reddit is not known for that sort of thing. Blue chip companies and governments can't file false DMCA claims, get sites to purge discussion, and impose a media blackout over it, and you're saying some indie game developer can?

[DSMatticus]

What the fuck, name_here? Have you secretly been a total fucking moron all along or have you just been living under a rock for the past ENTIRETY OF YOUTUBE'S OWNERSHIP BY GOOGLE, which is for reference like a million internet years.

It is a well-known and thoroughly established fact that Youtube's copyright claims system is so totally in favor of claim-makers that it's a fucking joke. There are literally examples of people who have had their completely original content removed by anonymous trolls making false claims. TotalBiscuit did in fact make a fair use review, not a let's play, but a review, that was removed by a small indie company because they didn't like what it had to say. And it is simply a fucking fact that MundaneMatt's video was taken down by someone in Zoe Quinn's name because of a DMCA claim. If you went to the link for it between the time it was removed and the time it was reuploaded, you got a message from Youtube telling you that it was unavailable due to a DMCA claim by Zoe Quinn. That is the story according to the automated system Youtube itself uses to inform people of DMCA claims on videos they're trying to watch.

And the reddit thing is similarly hilarious. Because reddit's deletion of threads and mass-deletion of comments isn't contested by any single fucking person who has any idea what the fuck happened. It is a thing that happened. There are screenshots of it. There are leaks from moderators who were involved. There is an official statement by the reddit admins on reddit. What. The. Fuck.

The only two possible explanations for the words coming out of your mouth are that 1) you are my grandmother and cannot internet, or 2) you are so devoted to the narrative that Zoe Quinn can't possibly be in the wrong that you have inflicted yourself with willful ignorance. You had a number of avenues available to express semi-reasonable cynicism (which I then would have responded to with further evidence and arguments), but "censorship doesn't happen - not on Youtube" is quite possibly the only one with which you could so thoroughly destroy your own credibility so quickly.

No. You do not get to make counterfactual statements from your own uninformed incredulity because you're too fucking lazy to do any research whatsoever. You have no further right to be taken seriously in this discussion. If you have any dignity whatsoever you'll fuck off quietly, and if you have any sense of shame you'll apologize. I have listened to a lot of well-meaning idiots as part of the GamerGate clusterfuck but Jesus fucking Christ somehow your decision to express skepticism that water is wet and Youtube fucks the little people is by far the most infuriating I've heard so far. It is so completely out of touch with reality that I know you didn't even bother to check to see if you were about to make an ass out of yourself. And so it came to be that you made an ass out of yourself.

And this is why GamerGate was so fucking depressing. Because a bunch of people you might have otherwise thought were perfectly reasonable human beings capable of at least making an earnest attempt to understand a complicated issue instead turned out to be the sort of people who would lie to you out of laziness, ignorance, and the petty tribalistic assumption that because Zoe Quinn is wearing ethical labels she must be an ethical person. Fucking. Hell.

[name_here]

I know very well how notoriously and thoroughly fucked youtube's DMCA system is. That is my point. You're not simply describing someone making malicious DMCA takedown requests that get honored, you're describing a massive suppression campaign across a huge number of major sites, many of which are famously rather unsympathetic to feminist causes like 4chan, carried out by a minor indie developer who is assisted by the entirety of gaming journalism because... why exactly?

Alternately, maybe Reddit is telling the truth when they say they removed it for violating their terms of service.

Finally: Why are we removing posts? That's really the big question now, at least toward us. First, it's because witch hunting and doxing (the reveal or posting of personal information) is against reddit's global rules. We have no say in them and must enforce them. Even if the original post doesn't include doxing or witch hunting, the comments invariably do. We cannot effectively moderate these threads, high volume as they are, with the 3-4 moderators we currently have. Especially since we have to run the subreddit as usual and deal with the absurd volume of modmail traffic, plus respond to various accusations and report personal threats to the admins (which is our policy).

[Kaelik]

I know very well how notoriously and thoroughly fucked youtube's DMCA system is. That is my point. You're not simply describing someone making malicious DMCA takedown requests that get honored, you're describing a massive suppression campaign across a huge number of major sites, many of which are famously rather unsympathetic to feminist causes like 4chan, carried out by a minor indie developer who is assisted by the entirety of gaming journalism because... why exactly?

Alternately, maybe Reddit is telling the truth when they say they removed it for violating their terms of service.

Finally: Why are we removing posts? That's really the big question now, at least toward us. First, it's because witch hunting and doxing (the reveal or posting of personal information) is against reddit's global rules. We have no say in them and must enforce them. Even if the original post doesn't include doxing or witch hunting, the comments invariably do. We cannot effectively moderate these threads, high volume as they are, with the 3-4 moderators we currently have. Especially since we have to run the subreddit as usual and deal with the absurd volume of modmail traffic, plus respond to various accusations and report personal threats to the admins (which is our policy).

You'll note that what they actually said is "We are deleting all discussions that ever even tangentially reference the subject because sometimes some of those threads might feature stuff that violates the terms of service."

Which would also be the justification for deleting literally everything on reddit.

[name_here]

Some subjects are more likely to do that than others.

[Orion]

I usually agree with DSM about these kinds of things, so I'm genuinely shocked at how different our takes are. I'm grateful to DSM because I did learn legitimately new and interesting information from his post, but it has some inexcusable omissions.

How GamerGate Became A ThingAt this point, it was really nothing more than a bunch of gossip about a terrible breakup and fairly shaky allegations of minor corruption.

This is super misleading. Gjoni posted his shit on the 17th. I haven't seen evidence that she had any content removed from anywhere before the 19th. On the 18th I *think* the channers had already dug up and distributed her nudes. They were definitely in the middle of a very public doxxing campaign. I haven't found a list of exactly what was doxxed when because no one responsible would post that. I'd say it's disingenuous to call that kind of harassment "just gossip." Also, the corruption allegations weren't shaky, they were transparently false.

Then Zoe Quinn did something very shady and very stupid. She contacted the hosting providers of a couple small videogame blogging outlets discussing Eron Gjoni's allegations and demanded that those articles be taken down, which they were.

I don't know the details of this part. I'm 100% willing to believe she did that and was wrong to do so. I haven't seen the articles, so I don't know how critical they were of Gjoni's allegations. His original post was probably libel. Screens of parts of the removed articles look like they were repeating his libel uncritically. That's not actionable libel for the magazine because they don't have actual malice, but it's still shitty. I don't know what threats if any she made. I will say that it's reasonable to ask a publication to take down articles that repeat libel without repudiating it.

Similarly, a video by some minor youtube nobody named MundaneMatt covering the topic got taken down with a false and malicious DMCA claim in Zoe Quinn's name.

This prompted a response by major youtube somebody TotalBiscuit ..."I'm staying the fuck out of this because I have no idea how to sort the bullshit from the facts, but if that really was Zoe Quinn who had that video taken down (and it may not have been, because Youtube's systems are terrible) then I thoroughly condemn her. Abusing IP law to censor people is unethical. It's also stupid, because of the Barbara Streisand effect."

I didn't really know anything about this until now. DMCA spamming is obviously shitty unjustifiable behavior.

Two things happened in response. The first is that a bunch of Zoe Quinn's supporters in the industry started a twitter lynch mob after TotalBiscuit's head. Not really kidding. The bold opinion that "censorship bad" earned him the scorn of the developer and journalist community. You had people unironically threatening him with DMCA claims for reviewing their games and calling him a misogynist shitbag and Phil Fish got so angry he quit video games for the bajillionth time.

This is basically accurate.

Then, Zoe Quinn did another very shady and stupid thing; she went to the reddit admins and told them "make reddit stop talking about me."

I don't understand how this is shady. I checked like 3 sources and none of them say she threatened Reddit. Reddit isn't a newspaper, it's a social forum. They have no legal obligation to host discussions they don't want to host, and they have no moral obligation to host discussions they don't want to host. For fuck's sake, the Den won't even let us talk shit about posters on other webforums. I'm fairly certain the great fence builder would delete our threads if we started distributing personal information and organizing harassment of public figures. Reddit is justified in taking down anything they think makes them look bad, and anyone is justified in point out shit that makes them look bad.
(part 1)

[Ancient History]

The tl;dr version is:

0) The whole thing started because one asshat accused his ex-girlfriend of giving good reviews of the game made by the guy she was currently fucking.

You got that mixed up. The girlfriend made a game and was accused of fucking the reviewers.

I sit corrected.

[DSMatticus]

I know very well how notoriously and thoroughly fucked youtube's DMCA system is. That is my point. You're not simply describing someone making malicious DMCA takedown requests that get honored, you're describing a massive suppression campaign across a huge number of major sites, many of which are famously rather unsympathetic to feminist causes like 4chan, carried out by a minor indie developer who is assisted by the entirety of gaming journalism because... why exactly?

You know what? I have a simple challenge for you: say that you approve of the media coverage of Occupy Wall Street. Tell us all that you don't think the media successfully spun OWS into a ridiculous parody of itself. Go ahead. If you can do that, then hey, you're stupid and terrible but at least you're consistent. On the flip side, if you don't think OWS got a fair shake in the media, then why the fuck are you so naive and gullible that you don't think the media can piss on people and get away with it? GG sure as fuck wasn't as large or as important as OWS.

It is absolutely true that that youtube video was taken down by a false DMCA claim in Zoe Quinn's name. It is absolutely true that someone contacted the hosting provider for some blogger site and demanded an article about the original allegations down. It is absolutely true that a couple of reddit mods came forward to point fingers at Zoe Quinn when the reddit crackdown started. And it is absolutely true that Zoe Quinn has denied none of these things. And it is absolutely true that people (even prominent industry figures) who tried to talk about them got branded a misogynist and shouted down by the figures you're defending for some inexplicable reason.

Your actual theory seems to be "if any of those things were important, the media wouldn't be able to do a blackout on them! Therefore, those things can't have been important. Therefore, the fact that the media is completely ignoring those things isn't a media blackout." It's so fucking insane and circular I can only assume you sucked the idea right out of your own asshole.

But also, maybe you missed the memo: video games journalism is notoriously corrupt and insular. That part isn't really up for debate. The industry is small enough that a huge percentage can call one another drinking buddies and close former coworkers. Zoe Quinn isn't "some developer," she is a close personal friend of a bunch of people who wrote articles about GamerGate. And those people are close personal friends of a bunch of other people who wrote articles about GamerGate. And that's basically it. I'm pretty convinced you'd only really need to take two steps to net everyone who matters.

For fuck's sake, Kotaku, Gawker, and Jezebel are all owned by the exact same company. Polygon, The Verge, and Vox are all owned by the exact same company. Rock, Paper Shotgun is closely affiliated with Eurogamer, which is closely affiliated with PC Gamer. And people shift between writing for any of those websites and writing for any of those other websites and working on video games seamlessly. For example, you can go read reviews of Borderlands 2 on Destructoid right now by the lead writer's former coworkers, something the lead writer himself bragged about on twitter to troll GamerGaters.

Alternately, maybe Reddit is telling the truth when they say they removed it for violating their terms of service.

Finally: Why are we removing posts? That's really the big question now, at least toward us. First, it's because witch hunting and doxing (the reveal or posting of personal information) is against reddit's global rules. We have no say in them and must enforce them. Even if the original post doesn't include doxing or witch hunting, the comments invariably do. We cannot effectively moderate these threads, high volume as they are, with the 3-4 moderators we currently have. Especially since we have to run the subreddit as usual and deal with the absurd volume of modmail traffic, plus respond to various accusations and report personal threats to the admins (which is our policy).

That's blanket censorship you stupid jackass! For fuck's sake, you are seriously suggesting that it might be okay to censor a discussion of whether or not the Israeli government is guilty of crimes against the Palestinian people because if we tried to have that talk a bunch of antisemites would show up to call for the Holocaust 2.0. "Gee, I sure am sorry about the fact that you live in a concentration camp, but we can't talk about how horrible that is because the antisemites might agree with us." Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

This is super misleading. Gjoni posted his shit on the 17th. I haven't seen evidence that she had any content removed from anywhere before the 19th. On the 18th I *think* the channers had already dug up and distributed her nudes. They were definitely in the middle of a very public doxxing campaign. I haven't found a list of exactly what was doxxed when because no one responsible would post that. I'd say it's disingenuous to call that kind of harassment "just gossip." Also, the corruption allegations weren't shaky, they were transparently false.

I'm not sure why you think that's misleading. It's not the least bit inconsistent with anything I said, and I specifically cover the MRA/anti-SJW/conservative shitstain angle later. At best, you're yelling at me for not putting it front and center. And to be perfectly honest I don't think it deserves to be front and center. If the censorship campaign hadn't happened, GamerGate never would have been a thing. It would have died in a couple of weeks. GamerGate did not become a thing because of misogyny, it became a thing because of the Streisand effect, and if I'm going to talk about why GamerGate happened I'm going to talk about the censorship and the Streisand effect first and foremost.

and they have no moral obligation to host discussions they don't want to host.

This is totally bullshit. It's simply a fact that modern social networks are an important part of how we as a society communicate. Yes, they're privately owned, and that technically means when they take away your voice it's not an act of government censorship. But it's still incredibly harmful to free speech when they exercise that carelessly. People have seriously used twitter to help organize actual revolutions. We must hold websites with that sort of volume to the highest standards possible; sufficiently powerful corporations are just as dangerous to a free society as any government if not moreso.

I cannot get behind the broad statement that obscenely powerful private entities do not have an ethical (and preferably legal) obligation to protect public goods such as free speech. The fact that they're private entities genuinely makes it a complicated problem, but that does not mean you can throw up your hands and tell them they can do whatever they want.

[Orion]

The Media Response Is Bullshit
At this point, there are obviously very legitimate positions to have that make you a GGer. For one, if you don't believe in using false and malicious DMCA claims to silence people saying mean things about you, then you could respectably count yourself in the GG camp. But at the same time, this controversy has a lot of appeal to MRA assholes and anti-SJW shitstains, because Zoe Quinn is a woman and "one of them there damn ess-jay-dubyas!" That's what brought Adam Baldwin aboard, who dubbed it GamerGate.

By the time Adam Baldwin named the GamerGate mob, there were no longer any legitimate reasons to affiliate with it. There's no benefit whatsoever to posting your concerns about Youtube moderation policy on a hashtag full of rape threats. Nobody is going to hear you or take you seriously.

it hit mainstream news, like CNN. And their coverage of GamerGate was "here's Anita Sarkeesian. She is a woman. She talks about videogames. She gets death threats. GamerGate is a thing. Make of this what you will."

Anita Sarkeesian was a story in her right, though. Some of the same people were harassing her, but as far as I know there were never any allegations that she had anything to do with zoe quinn or with game reviewers. The Quinnspiracy isn't somehow necessary context to understand the Sarkeesian story. A bomb threat on a university event with a controversial speaker is national news. Favor-trading in gaming magazines isn't.

As for professional corruption, well; what spells corruption better than a media blackout to defend one of your own from allegations of illegal use of the DMCA to censor critics?

You'll have to spell this out for me. The "allegations of illegal DMCA" were removed from Reddit and 4Chan. Is Zoe "one of Reddit's own?" Professional corruption by definition happens between professional colleagues, and I don't think Zoe and the Reddit admins are in the same profession.

EDIT: or to put it another way, neither Zoe nor Reddit mods are journalists, so I don't see how journalistic ethics are relevant.

[DSMatticus]

The Media Response Is Bullshit
At this point, there are obviously very legitimate positions to have that make you a GGer. For one, if you don't believe in using false and malicious DMCA claims to silence people saying mean things about you, then you could respectably count yourself in the GG camp. But at the same time, this controversy has a lot of appeal to MRA assholes and anti-SJW shitstains, because Zoe Quinn is a woman and "one of them there damn ess-jay-dubyas!" That's what brought Adam Baldwin aboard, who dubbed it GamerGate.

By the time Adam Baldwin named the GamerGate mob, there were no longer any legitimate reasons to affiliate with it. There's no benefit whatsoever to posting your concerns about Youtube moderation policy on a hashtag full of rape threats. Nobody is going to hear you or take you seriously.

First, false DMCA claims isn't a "Youtube moderation policy" issue. It's an illegal abuse of IP law done by an individual, facilitated by Youtube's system for handling such claims automatically ruling in favor of the individual making the claim.

Second, you are letting the same people GamerGate protested against tell you what GamerGate "was really about." Spoiler: Brianna Wu's deaththreats didn't get a bunch of media coverage because the entire movement was dedicated to sending Brianna Wu deaththreats. Briannu Wu's deathreats got a bunch of media coverage because it was a way to discredit the entire movement by shining the spotlight on a specific asshat. Remember when conservative media finally broke down and started covering OWS... by cherrypicking examples of protesters holding apparently ludicrous signs and making fun of them? Tzor did it here, once. They didn't do that because OWS was actually that crazy, they did it because they wanted to make OWS look bad so people would dismiss the movement and it would eventually wither and die.

You're basically helping them do the the "fuck the Palestinians because antisemitism" thing, where you claim everyone needs to shut the fuck up because some of the people speaking are terrible human beings. Back when you could actually discuss this shit on 4chan's /v/ and Adam Baldwin opened his stupid fucking mouth and some conservative publications started paying attention, a lot of people there were really fucking unhappy. Because they weren't social conservatives, and they didn't want social conservatives stealing their movement. But that internal division is just another thing that didn't get picked up by the media because the media's goal wasn't coverage, it was spin. TotalBiscuit and Boogie were way less contentious and far more respected figures, but again... you don't know that because the people you're getting your information from consider that too inconvenient a truth to report.

As for professional corruption, well; what spells corruption better than a media blackout to defend one of your own from allegations of illegal use of the DMCA to censor critics?

You'll have to spell this out for me. The "allegations of illegal DMCA" were removed from Reddit and 4Chan. Is Zoe "one of Reddit's own?" Professional corruption by definition happens between professional colleagues, and I don't think Zoe and the Reddit admins are in the same profession.

I'm referring to the media coverage when I say that, not the reddit censorship. Zoe Quinn is close friends with a bunch of journalists, and the overwhelming journalist response was to defend her by smearing her detractors as misogynists, even when her detractors were just saying "hey, that censorship thing seems pretty fucking scummy, what's with that?"

[Kaelik]

it hit mainstream news, like CNN. And their coverage of GamerGate was "here's Anita Sarkeesian. She is a woman. She talks about videogames. She gets death threats. GamerGate is a thing. Make of this what you will."

Anita Sarkeesian was a story in her right, though. Some of the same people were harassing her, but as far as I know there were never any allegations that she had anything to do with zoe quinn or with game reviewers. The Quinnspiracy isn't somehow necessary context to understand the Sarkeesian story. A bomb threat on a university event with a controversial speaker is national news. Favor-trading in gaming magazines isn't.

And yet, this was the New York Times article on the subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/techn ... .html?_r=0

or the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... -at-event/

[name_here]

So I checked it turns out that the video got taken down on Aug 17th, reuploaded with the video changed 18th and did not appear to have been taken down at any point, Totalbiscuit put up his post on Aug 19th, and the original video got restored on Aug 21st. Note that the audio was the actually meaningful portion. So it wasn't much in the way of censorship, which provides a good reason for why Forbes, The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, IGN, Gamespy, et. al. opted not to mention it when they covered GamerGate.

Also, while using a screengrab from a game as your background while talking about allegations towards the developer of the game is probably fair use, it is not sufficiently definitely fair use to call it a fake DMCA claim.