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Comment by eeZi | Hacker News Reader

:(...

As someone who didn't really follow the whole controversy the past years, this was an eye-opener for me. Did it really get that bad?

Stop tolerating the intolerant! Also, I don't understand the point of GamerGate. As an outsider, all I see is two groups making themselves look really bad and everyone else loosing. You don't convince others by threatening and harassing them, something the extremes at both sides seem to do. Why?

By the way, note how she did not mention the harasser's username in her post.

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I don't follow you on that last bit, about noticing how she didn't mention the username. I feel like you mean to imply something, but maybe I'm not following?

I like that she didn't, since it emphasizes that this is not about that particular conflict, but the way it has been handled. She could have mentioned his name in an effort to make him look bad (this post will probably get a lot of attention), but she didn't.

ahh, thanks for clarifying, wasn't sure if you were implying something else.

In regards to your question, yes things got bad, unfortunately what is hard to see from the outside, is that the vast majority of the harassment was originally done by outside third parties who just wanted to troll two groups. They harassed some people (mostly women) then said they were part of GamerGate. This wasn't even remotely true, and they admitted to this. Unfortunately the other side got caught up in the harassment and the claim that was done by GamerGate to ever actually think, "Why would this person who is harassing me (which is illegal) mention they were part of GamerGate (which was originally about Games Media, and had literally nothing to do with women in tech)?"

Follow that up with lots of mudslinging on both sides, and neither side being that willing to 'dig-deep' into the facts, and you get a year long 'cyber-war' between two groups of people who probably have much more in common than they think.

Did anybody in GamerGate ever criticize any male gaming journalists? Citation requested.

They don't limit their idiocy to misogynistic attacks on women.

They criticized Nathan Grayson of Kotaku for supposedly having relationships with people GamerGate didn't like and writing about them without disclosing said relationships.

Depending on the site you read, it's either a violation of journalism ethics, or GamerGate blowing something out of proportion again. In lieu of a citation, you can google it if you really want.

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