25 Years of Wikipedia

Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by acdha on Thursday January 15, 2026 @12:57PM (#46636477)

GamerGate was about journalism in the same way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was to protect the rights of ethnic Russian minorities in that country. The GamerGate people used ethics as an excuse because that sounds a lot more reasonable than “hate mob riled up by a bitter ex”, but it fell apart as soon as you looked at the evidence (e.g. they were most focused on attacking a developer over a relationship with someone who never reviewed her games), where they went for support (right-wing agitators with low journalistic ethics), and all of the real issues they ignored between huge gaming companies and the major media outlets.

The excuse was as believable as someone saying they were super concerned about ethics in tech journalism, but then never said a word about a huge tech company and spent all of their time badgering the Temple OS guy for sharing a meal with an OS News writer.

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Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by FiveOhThree on Thursday January 15, 2026 @02:44PM (#46638110)

Or, you know, people had long been unhappy with the poor state of game reviews and the incident in question prompted broad complaints. Rather than accept criticism the journalists in focus instead decided to use their platforms to smear their critics as a sexist hate mob.

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Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by acdha on Thursday January 15, 2026 @03:33PM (#46638856)

If that was really their motive, they sure picked an odd way to express it by focusing their efforts on attacking one woman with very little power in the industry while ignoring the actual game media outlets and huge companies. It’s like claiming you’re an environmental activist but instead of even talking about Exxon you’re busy making death threats to the local pet store claiming their organic kibble isn’t really organic.

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Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by FiveOhThree on Thursday January 15, 2026 @04:06PM (#46639313)

That's it though, at the time there were plenty of complaints about the media outlets and publishers. Your problem is that the only people reporting on this to the wider public were the very journalists that the group were criticising.

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Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by acdha on Thursday January 15, 2026 @06:20PM (#46640860)

GamerGate wasn’t doing that work and they distracted mightily from it. For example, the much-hated Kotaku was actually doing reporting which got them black listed so not only was GamerGate not contributing there, they were actually harming the people who were:

https://kotaku.com/a-price-of-games-journalism-1743526293

Even if they had also been involved, it would not excuse the abusive behavior.

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Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by FiveOhThree on Thursday January 15, 2026 @06:54PM (#46641200)

That Kotaku piece was a full year after GamerGate, if anything people might question whether it'd have happened if GamerGate hasn't drawn attention to these problems.

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Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by acdha on Thursday January 15, 2026 @10:51PM (#46642803)

GamerGate was still going strong in 2015, and did absolutely nothing to help stories like that. The people attacking journalists don’t get to take credit for their targets’ work.

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Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by FiveOhThree on Friday January 16, 2026 @03:49AM (#46644446)

I'm sure that the journalists involved would never admit that people putting a spotlight on their bad behaviour made them clean up their act.

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Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by acdha on Friday January 16, 2026 @07:47AM (#46645872)

Sexist attacks and lying about an imaginary sex-for-reviews scandal didn’t put a spotlight on anything. It wouldn’t excuse their actions even if they had been doing some real ethics work, but they weren’t even showing up to do productive work.

One reason why everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate was because it distracted attention from non-imaginary problems and meant that anyone talking about journalistic ethics had to spend time proving they were acting in good faith rather than being part of the hateful mob.

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Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by FiveOhThree on Friday January 16, 2026 @08:14AM (#46646057)

I understand that you buy heavily into one side of this narrative, but statements like "everyone who actually cared about those issues opposed GamerGate" come across as naive rather than informed.

Sure, the label of GamerGate was clearly made toxic by a combination of bad actors within and the significant smear campaign in the press, but it remains extremely obvious that the gaming community were not happy with the state of the industry.

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Re:25 Years of Wikipedia by zahlman on Friday January 16, 2026 @01:59PM (#46650518)

There was no "sex-for-reviews scandal" and nobody "lying about" it.

> and meant that anyone talking about journalistic ethics had to spend time proving they were acting in good faith rather than being part of the hateful mob.

This is a consequence of the fact that very many people were very obviously not acting in good faith.

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