Your experience with them may be negative, but the general social memes about Kotaku are one hundred and ten percent fostered by the regressive parts of the gaming community that don't like that they give people who have the temerity to not be white, cis, and straight a platform. (And 'ekianjo's body of work on Hacker News makes me disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.) I will go to bat for Schreier specifically, but there's a reason why they had Patrick Klepek and his Scoops around, too (until Vice came knocking, anyway).

They are legit. Maybe now Waypoint edges them out as they seem really dedicated to doing good investigative stuff (Klepek and others), I dunno, but it's pretty much those two and Eurogamer doing the heavy lifting in the "widely read" spaces.

In reality, one of the things that actually got Kotaku a bad reputation back in the day was the endless, gratuitous stream of scantily clad chicks on the front page, many not even vaguely gaming related. It turns out that doing that whilst lecturing your audience on how they're all evil misogynists who're objectifying women wins few friends, especially if you then try and smear the people who don't take your publication seriously because of it as evil bigots who just can't handle your social justice awesomeness.

(Also, since this obviously pissed off people on the feminist side of things too, something really weird happened: people started arguing that obviously the gamer complaints about Kotaku not being about gaming anymore were really just misogynists trying to undermine feminism, because if they really cared about it being gaming-focused there was far more unrelated cheesecake than feminism and social justice posts. Except the unrelated cheesecake posts were a huge part of what created that idea about Kotaku in the first place; they'd been had!)

Yea I mean, I don't know anything about what Gamergate thinks, and I don't have as low an opinion of Kotaku as you're saying that GG does. Ive just never had any exposure to as _high_ an opinion as you have of them and was curious about it. Not really a domain I know much about, to be honest.

I have a high opinion of some of the people who work for them more than I do the outlet itself. I don't read it on a daily basis. But when news breaks that actually holds up, it basically comes from Kotaku, Eurogamer, or (lately) Vice/Waypoint, while the sites started by or pushed by folks who get thirsty about those three--the Reaxxions, ha ha ha, of the world--are mostly just angry whineboxes.