https://archive.is/4Tp9N#selection-7679.0-7679.603
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2tbbkg/a_fi...
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.
Kappa.
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.
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.)
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.
People have written bits and pieces on this before
Nobody really cares.
Here's a post about EA giving early access to Reddit mods, who didn't disclose it. 2000 upvotes: https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3c8wze/ethi...
There's definitely a constituency among gamers.
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.)
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?
[citation needed]
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.
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?
It seems quite uncivil to me to claim that I'm unethical and the not even bother to support that claim, but curiously enough, I don't see you complaining about that.
No you haven't. You almost got both of us banned from HN for being uncivil.
As for Quinn, no on here is talking about her or harassment other than the anti-GGers. I've been talking about Kotaku.
In response to ethical breaches in your articles (opposed to your activism which I've broken down already), I'd say all of your articles are suspect given your publicly stated stance on non-disclosed relationships.
How many of those articles are written about your friends without you disclosing it?
You brought up Kotaku in response to this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10253942
The context is very specifically Zoe Quinn.
> In response to ethical breaches in your articles (opposed to your activism which I've broken down already),
What "activism" have you "broken down"?
> I'd say all of your articles are suspect given your publicly stated stance on non-disclosed relationships.
You do understand, right, that your standards and expectations for disclosure have nothing to do with any recognized standard for journalistic ethics, right? Just open a newspaper or read a website.
> How many of those articles are written about your friends without you disclosing it?
You tell me! You're the one asserting that I'm an unethical journalist. Surely you have some kind of factual basis to justify such an allegation?
Pulitzer disagrees with you. From http://pulitzercenter.org/about-us/ethics-and-standards-poli...
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
Normal activities - outside work, investments, political activism - pose special problems for journalists. Often, it's best to avoid activities that might interfere with your ability to function as a journalist. Alternatively, you may be precluded from working on certain topics for the Pulitzer Center if you're personally involved.
A third alternative is public disclosure of any information that a site user might find relevant in understanding the content. Someone who is writing about a relative would need to disclose the relationship. A guest contributor writing about politics would need to disclose if he is associated with a candidate, and any employment or other financial relationship that could be viewed as related to the topic being reported.
Full disclosure of relevant information is standard practice for the Pulitzer Center - a necessary step but not always sufficient when a potential conflict of interest exists.
No they don't.
> Full disclosure of relevant information is standard practice for the Pulitzer Center
Wake me when political or economic writers disclose which candidates and politicians they know and voted for, or when film writers disclose the names of all the PR people who they talk to, or any of the other relationships that aren't routinely disclosed because they're not material. "relevant information" does not mean "anything and everything".
I repeat: your standards and expectations for disclosure have nothing to do with any recognized standard for journalistic ethics.
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.