A Natural A/B Test of Harassment | Hacker News Reader

A Natural A/B Test of Harassment

developers.kongregate.com

123 pointsbenologist128 comments

What I urge people in this thread to do is not to pick up a google search, or read a book, but to just go out and ask a few female friends what their thoughts are about being online, being safe, and being respected, and to listen with an open mind.

I see a lot of denial in here, people rooting around for reasons to think that there isn't a serious fucking problem with intimidation and psychological violence taking place on the net. I see a lot of cognitive dissonance, and that's sad, that's not a scientific mindset. You all need to get out of your comfort zone.

I'm a straight white male software developer, I don't need to care about this for any reason other than a life that doesn't have truth and fairness as a cause isn't worth living. I encourage you all to calm down, reach out, and really understand what it's like on the other side.

Well said.

We have a similar dialog going on among the power users at Quora. The trouble women were having really escalated when the first influx of general users showed up.

It got to the point where many of them were going to leave.

All of us had a discussion, and Quora had a discussion in private with the women.

The ban hammer came down on a surprisingly large number of users. And it still comes down.

Most of us men, who participated in this, got to understand a lot. Due to the nature of that site, and that we have real life meetup events, many women felt it OK to just share with us, no filters.

And I was stunned. Thought I had some idea, and just didn't. Of course, now I do.

Honestly, that these stronger women were able to experience that, share it with others including men and continue on in seemingly normal ways is kind of amazing to me.

If more people were able to have these kinds of conversations, I suspect social norms would start to shift quickly, as would actions to remedy the problem.

Not that we don't have actions now. We do. People are supporting others who need it and we are beginning to speak out more and discuss it more.

But that ban hammer session was notable. A lot of the community got the message right away.

A shame the point needs to be repeatedly made. A five minute foray into the wasteland that is twitch chat will show some pretty stark differences between how men and women become targets for trolling and vitriol.

While some of the concerns of the whole gamergate mess were perhaps reasonable at some point in time, the whole thing has disappeared under a huge number of people who see their any supposed righteousness as license to indulge in the pettiest of attacks that aligns them with segments of society I'd foolishly thought we'd largely left behind.

Seriously, if you're looking for some injustices in the world to help make your life meaningful, you can do a hell of a lot better than "ethics in video game journalism", vitriolic element or no.

I'm commenting to register my frustration with what I call the "harm reductionism fallacy".

At it's most extreme point, it can be parodied to something like "You have no right to complain about a problem in your privileged life because people are starving in $COUNTRY"

In all it's forms, it's a sort of ridicule directed towards people trying to make their lives better. I believe people have the right to complain about, and try to improve, any and every element of their lives- right down to asking for better/healthier free lunches from their employers.

Working for ethics in video game journalism and to reduce nasty sex related comments towards women stands to reform a genuinely nasty cesspool in modern society

The impassioned hysteria over 'ethics in video game journalism' is the problematic part, not the issue itself.

And, to be frank, that ridiculous level of hysteria makes it clear that it's not really about ethics in video game journalism. No-one is dead or has been maimed by it. Lives aren't destroyed by it. Basically, it's a good example of dog whistle politics, using a term that is more palatable to push a less palatable agenda: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

You can be concerned about ethics in game journalism and try to do something about it even though other injustices exist, by my book at least. But the gamergate tag has been effectively taken over by the misogynists and haters. That may not be fair, but it's a fact. If people in the first group continue to use that umbrella they are aiding the people in the second group. Again, not fair, but that's the way it is.

It's incredibly unfair because the members of gamergate that aren't spewing misogyny and hate can't really start another movement, that movement would just be taken over by the same people they are trying to distance themselves from. So they can't distance themselves from the hate and their movement is being attacked because of the hate coming from these interlopers and Gawker/The Media is going to just continue to inflame the haters.

How are people supposed to get anything done?

I tend to think Gamergate was a brewing culture war that was just looking for a spark to start the fire. Gamer culture has had a persecution complex for well over a generation, particularly with respect to the press - even the gaming press. Being repeatedly insulted and attacked by the media has made them circle their wagons instinctively. Combined with a substantial fraction of gamers that are intensely misogynistic and this ugliness was practically inevitable.

The problem is that gamers picked a fight with SJWs, which are effectively their own mirror image - the same obsessiveness and mean-spirited put-downs and in-group high-fives. I mean, the fact that the SJWs are right is almost immaterial - in the words of The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole". Online social justice groups have a knack for utterly alienating and insulting everyone they could ever hope to convince, even those who broadly agree with them.

Combine that with Gawker media's spectacular ability to stir the pot, and a few prominent right-wing culture-war bloggers feeding the gamer-gaters' persecution complex, and we're seeing outright radicalization.

You isolate and insult a guy and then give him an online culture of like-minded outcasts and they start encouraging each other to do drastic things. There are obvious parallels to other movements of angry young men...

It's a perfect storm, and it's only going to get worse before it gets better since anybody who's trying to talk the gamergaters down from the ledge has to have infinite patience for their monomaniacal rationalizations. They see themselves as the defenders of rationality surrounded by SJWs who fling glib insults... and gaming is founded on endlessly grinding against a pointless task for fun.

It's profoundly sad to see so many gamers rally behind that gamergate banner. To see harassment and threats and ruining women's lives become the public image of core gamer culture.

I'm really worried that this is going to get worse before it gets better. The "us vs. them" mentality of the hardcore gamer world is too old and well-established, and everybody else involved is either feeding into it or is drowned out by the din.

I started seeing the phrase "Social Justice Warrior" used a lot as soon as #Gamergate happened. I have yet to see it well defined, though.

I realize it's tangential to your point, but I'm curious how would you define or describe a SJW?

Traditionally, the term has been used to describe people who make comments like http://i.imgur.com/QMbGVLG.png or http://i.imgur.com/vJgiov8.jpg or http://i.imgur.com/fMcjKsg.png.

Essentially, radical social justice viewpoints taken to absurd extremes. Sometimes to the point of expressing highly racist, homophobic, or transphobic views in the course of supporting some other group they feel is even more persecuted than those groups.

Now, the term is being thrown around by some people to describe those who are left leaning and support a viewpoint they disagree with.

So-called "Social Justice Warriors" are indeed an actual and rather ridiculous (yet amusing) group on the Internet, mostly centered around Tumblr, but their overall population density is pretty low compared to progressives and feminists in general.

More examples of the first group, because we could all use a laugh:

http://a.pomf.se/vrwobd.png

http://a.pomf.se/mdiqol.jpg

http://a.pomf.se/jdwkkw.png

http://a.pomf.se/brsunc.png

http://a.pomf.se/wcjfcv.jpg

Some examples of the second group might include the people who flagkilled half of my comments in this thread. Man, I know political threads on Reddit News are a steaming pile, but y'all could at least pretend to be capable of talking to people you don't agree with and downvote me into oblivion instead.

It's weird to see the term "sjw" used by someone who isn't a repellant fuckwit. It's been a reliable flag -at least on HN- so far. That's something you might want to be aware of.

I'd gotten the impression they and their supporters had started to self-identify with the term.

I believe the speed of communication, gratis internet, has exceeded the speed at which a population can agree on the meaning of terms.

Absolutely. You can find this for even some of the most basic terms nowadays, like "feminist" and "liberal". Some people have extremely different ideas of what those 2 words mean.

For example, I consider myself both liberal and a feminist, but I take serious umbrage with many of the "radical feminists" and very far left leaning voices that have emerged out of these debates. Those same people would simply be considered just plain old feminists or liberals by some others, though.

Very well put. The phrase "perfect storm" crossed my mind when I first heard of this.

Disclaimer: I agree there is a real social problem here. The rest of this message is solely about statistics (inspired by the language of statistics used in the article, like "A/B Test," "statistical significance," and "99.9% confidence level").

The article opens with an analysis of messages to one male and one (self-selected) female from a community which has a large male majority.

Most people in the world are heterosexual, and in my opinion people are more likely to sexually harass the gender they "like." Let's say 3/4 of people are straight and 1/4 are gay. Let's also say that 2/3 of sexual harassment is directed at the "preferred" gender" of the perpetrator.

Imagine a population of 80 boys and 8 girls, all equally "good." Half of them never say a bad thing to anyone. The other half lash out once a month and say something disgusting.

Now, we have 60 straight boys, 30 of whom behave badly once a month. That's 30 nasty messages a month, 20 of which go to girls and 10 to boys. We also have 20 gay boys generating 10 nastygrams monthly, 7 to boys and 3 to girls.

As for the girls, there are 6 straight ones, 3 of whom are bad, so they send 2 threatening topics to boys and 1 to a girl each month. Of the 2 gay girls only one is malfeasant, so let's say she sends her only "love letter" to a girl.

How many total bad messages are sent each month? 20 + 3 + 1 + 1 = 25 to girls, and 10 + 7 + 2 + 0 = 19 to boys. With 80 total boys, each will receive about one salacious message per four months. But each of the 8 girls will absorb, on average, just over 3 per month.

I tried to use conservative numbers here, and still the girls in a male-majority group get 13 times as many unwanted notes as boys. This is deplorable, but it is also unsurprising given the population.

I think the question here is "will gamers harass men or women more". In this case you want your community to be representative of the community at large, so this gender imbalance makes sense.

Your point makes sense, but seems irrelevant to the discussion here.

I think it's exactly to the point: the question is if we have a fundamentally more sexist male population online than female population, or if we're seeing confounding variables introducing an apparently difference. I mean, there's clearly a problem with the experience women have with many online communities - just ask them, they're not shy about admitting it. The hard questions are why is their experience like that and what are the main contributing causes.

In fact, the last time we had a discussion about sexism here, someone posted a study to me claiming that it's often confounding community values that create a hotbed of apparent sexism.[1]

So if we're talking about the situation where what we see is a normal (and consistent at large with society) rate of men harassing women, we should be asking what we can do to fix the other parts of the community that enable these people to be unduly felt, such as not properly spam filtering messages between users. Why is it, for instance, I can tell my email client to never display a message with the word 'cunt' in it, except for whitelisted users, but I can't do this when trying to interact with people in public, such as reddit or Kongregate?

I believe what we see time and again when we analyze the numbers is not that we're seeing an inherently higher rate of sexism, to which we need to do something to fix the attitudes of men in general, but rather that we're seeing the undue influence of the usual rate of problematic actors - that is, it's way easier to bother a lot of people as a troll and dominate the conversation online than in person, and its this difference that is the cause of the problems, not the background rate of problematic actors.

[1] http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4291/33...

There is no discussion about the difference between male aggressors and female aggressors (though the examples were all male I imagine). The question is about aggressors in the gaming community as a whole,e ven if this is "just" a consequence of there being more men than women in the community, it's still an issue .

The question in the test was "is it easier to be a man or a women in the gaming community?", not "why". I agree that this doesn't answer the why, but I think it answer the initial question.

That's good statistics, and probably explains generic nastygram data quite well. However, my non-data-backed bet is that males are much more likely to send sexually harassing messages than females, so even in an environment with 50% males and 50% females, females will get much more sexual nastygrams than males.

You also need to account for technical ability. There's way more technical male users who know how not only to harass, but to get away with it.

On sites like Facebook where it's tied to a real life identity, I'd expect to see harassment drop significantly.

Identities don't change anything. I don't know what the solution is, but that's not it.

My current, occasional stalker - someone in the tech industry, a fellow dev, someone probably reading HN, even - gave away his name, phone, address... and it checks out. Police won't take him as a serious threat though, so neither will anyone else (like Twitter). Police also won't just check on him because I think he's schizophrenic from the very weird things he has sent me in the past. I just block him everywhere after the fact and hope that he has family/friends that will eventually check on him.

My last favorite game I stopped playing because people were harassing me, people that were easily tied to their FB accounts with their full name, employer, address, and more. They didn't give a shit. Neither did Blizzard. No care about rape threats. Okay. I'm done.

I'm also super disillusioned given what some people I know in this industry are saying about GG. They don't care that their real name and sometimes their employer is on their Twitter profile, even if they harass people with it. And of course, brace myself for the "but that was out of bounds and evil!", the handful of folks I can remember that have been fired for harassment on twitter - all happened because they had a real name+employer written down somewhere, and they thought they would get away with it.

Not to mention I'm really glad I'm out of the dating market because my okc and other dating site inboxes were cesspools. Again, real names or more than enough info to tie a person to their real name, and still they persist. I had the courtesy to reply to every message that wasn't some variation on "wanna suck my %&#$"/"your hot"/"i wanna do _____ to you" and yet some people still ended up going "you're a bitch"/"you're so fat i feel sorry for you i bet you don't get laid"/(rape threats).

I only wish real life identities were a deterrent, but that only happens if there are consequences. Given what's going on, apparently there are no consequences except in the oddest direction ever (with all the doxxing going on).

I'm really sorry you had to (and still have to) deal with that kind of harassment and threatening behavior.

The only question I'm left with is what can I do as an individual to help curtail it? I almost never see this behavior myself (presumably because bad actors intentionally hide their behavior) in real life so it's hard for me to call it out directly. How can I help out people that are being harassed in this way? Providing moral support doesn't feel like enough in the situation...

My husband spends practically 24/7 around me as he works next to me, but he still rarely sees that behavior directly or aimed at me until I copypaste/screenshot/link it to him. And I get a lot of direct and indirect bs in general that some people would have mental breakdowns over, mainly cause I help moderate /r/twoxchromosomes and I help with a yearly event or two for women in tech. All he hears until I bring it up is me muttering to myself about misogyny/misandry, me going 'for fucks sake' at yet another doxxing, or me rage-typing on irc (thankfully for him I don't have a clicky keyboard). One of my closer friends too, works at Big Name Dating Co., didn't understand it too much until he created a female test account for development. Ha. So don't worry about not seeing it.

Moral support is a lot more than many are offering, so don't feel bad in the slightest. Do exactly what you pointed out. Ask around and help people around you. They may not just be women, they may come from all kinds of backgrounds. Don't be silent, because some of the worst people are assuming that silence means support.

After you feel comfortable doing that, there's a lot of other hard questions to ask. How do you know that your workplace or community or product/service isn't complicit in similar problems? How do you do what you can to help others before a problem occurs? What if you make a mistake? What if you do see something awful but there's no good way to call it out? They're questions I struggle with all the time, and I think the biggest misconception with tech folks is that they're one-off problems easily/already solved when they're not. People going "why don't you report it to Twitter" that have never actually used Twitter's abuse/harassment reporting form. People going "ignore that" like it's not a problem that rears its ugly head for me daily given how many other women I know. People going "you could just not say anything" but then I wouldn't be moral support for even a single other person out there.

It's tough, welcome to the club ;) Making an effort to do anything is a good thing.

>I help moderate /r/twoxchromosomes

So the sexism definitely existed before you entered this position, but maybe the fact that you've exposed yourself is why you receive so much vitriol?

Look at Obama, do you think all the racism directed at him would have ever been as prominent if he stayed a Senator or a Chicago Lawyer?

People in positions of power always have their detractors. Could you provide some anecdotes of people attacking the normal users of twoxchromosomes seeing as you've probably dealt with quite a few.

I'm really sorry to hear that. As someone who has faced sexual harassment at work, I feel for you.

Good luck shaking off the crazies.

I'm sorry to hear that :( I'm lucky in that I've never really had to deal with that yet. The few times that could have happened it didn't, and I mainly work for myself now so it's easy to take myself out of a problem when it arises.

Thanks though. I have a reasonably thick skin and I'm used to it so I'm not too worried. I'm mostly worried about what this means for others. Hopefully more awareness means a better solution for this problem so others don't face it. I don't have enough relevant expertise or passion though, so I'm hoping until there's a YC funded company that focuses on fixing that ;)

It was stupidly blatant and my employer dealt with it once it was brought to their attention. Not fun by any means.

Oh, I've also faced internet crazies, but I've always practiced a reasonable level of anonymity as self-defense, so they've never been real threats. Actually it was amusing when one person sent all these harassing emails because they screwed up the Sendmail exploit and highlighted the real IP with something like SHADOW_SHADOW_SHADOW. Their ISP dropped them quickly once I explained all the interesting things I knew about that particular customer.

EDIT: It's a bit disheartening to see the two posts in this thread as my only posts that have not yet been downvoted on this story as these are honestly the least relevant to the topic at hand.

Every f*ing video on Youtube by a woman has that one jackass who posts "make me a sandwich" complemented with 10-100 upvotes.

people read youtube comments?

Hi, mods: Look at this thread. What does it mean for the appropriateness of "GamerGate" on Hacker News?

It's not just appropriate, it's overdue.

Look at all these ugly, ugly critters crawling out of the woodwork. They were already here before the scent of mass misogyny drew them out into the open.

Gamergate is leaking again.

Yeah, I've heard about Gamergate in a couple of wildly different contexts. What's the deal with it?

The extreme nutshell version is that a female indie game developer supposedly slept with a male video game journalist, and this supposedly let to favorable coverage for her game that would not have happened otherwise.

The surface phenomenon is that a lot of people united under the banner of #gamergate to protest this breach of journalistic ethics. The dark side is that it seems like it's really just a bunch of people who want to see someone's life ruined, and they are wildly overreacting.

I think the underlying phenomenon is similar to what happened to Brendan Eich, even though the ostensible cause and the people involved are completely different.

Those are the stated reasons.

It's worth noting no such review was ever written for Zoe Quinn's game.

GamerGate has now doxxed and threatened a number of women in the gaming world (developers, critics, actresses) and Phil Fish the creator of Fez. They publicly organize to drive advertisers away from publications which disagree with them or call Gamergate out as misogynistic or threatening.

Right, that's why I said "supposedly".

Yes, but saying "supposedly" is leaving the door open. The door is not open. No such thing ever happened.

If you ask Google to define "supposedly" it says: "according to what is generally assumed or believed (often used to indicate that the speaker doubts the truth of the statement)."

I hate these sort of semantic arguments. In case my sentence was not clear, I don't support the things that have been done to people under the guise of "Gamergate", I don't think she slept with anyone (nor do I care nor see why it is relevant), I don't think Kotaku gave the game good press because of the "alleged" romantic relationship, I honestly I don't give a shit about any of it, and I feel like I lost "the game" by even attempting to casually engage with this dumb fucking topic in any way.

Hey man, i'm not criticizing you. You're making a good point. I want to make that point even stronger.

It's not semantics in the sense that we're quibbling over the definition of words. Your point can be even more definitive. Gamergaters are claiming something that is not true.

It doesn't matter if Gamergaters believe it to be true. It's not. <3

The thing that confuses me (as a non-"Gamer" netizen) is that I am constantly bombarded with the "meta' arguing and hand-wringing about "GamerGate" on HN etc, but have yet to see anything actually from the core activity of the "movement" or whatever.

That's because it's largely a tempest in a teacup happening in a smaller corner of online culture, but various people who overlap between the two are trying to play up its importance for various political reasons.

Intel pulled advertising from Gamasutra under pressure from these people, some women independent game developers have "ragequit"(read: harassed beyond belief so did the only logical thing) from twitter and the like. It's violent if you follow the independent games scene

These are also the same group of people who forced Phil Fish off the internet, basically.

Intel pulled advertising from Gamasutra because they directly insulted a customer group that is very important to their brand. Intel didn't cave under pressure, they simply acted rationally to a media outlet committing brand suicide.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_t...

Phil Fish forced himself off the internet by being a contemptible jackass with an ego to rival that of Kanye West who fights with his coworkers, publicly shat on an aspiring Japanese game dev during a Q&A panel that asked him a polite question regarding his thoughts on their country's games, says that gamers are "the worst fucking people," tells people to "suck his dick, choke on it" then claims to be a feminist without a hint of irony, completely and utterly lacks self awareness, and just generally can't go a fucking day without throwing a tantrum on twitter.

EDIT: Oh neat, my other post in this thread, a collection of links from an opposing perspective, was flagkilled. Way to flag/downvote for disagreement, redd-I mean Hacker News.

I'll down vote you for dragging reddit into this for no reason.

> Phil Fish forced himself off the internet by being a contemptible jackass

So he totally deserved what was coming to him when GamerGate leaked his bank details and social security number to the public!</derp>

Even if someone is an asshole that doesn't legitimize harming them. This is exactly what is wrong with Gamergate.

I didn't know about that, and I agree, no one deserves to be "doxed." By "forced off the internet," I thought the GP was referring to Phil Fish's regular practice of throwing temper tantrums and "cancelling Fez 2" or "leaving the industry" every other week.

I think the vast majority of GamerGate supporters would agree with me about that; I check up on GG threads every day, and it's pretty clear that no one supports harming people. In fact, almost no one ever brings doxing up. On the rare occasion someone does, they're called an idiot, accused of "false flagging" (ie someone anti-GG pretending to support GG with threats of violence to make the movement look bad. yes, this has happened, people have been caught making violent comments just to take a screenshot that "proves" how evil GG is), and their posts are deleted pretty quickly. 99% of the focus now is on contacting advertisers and showing people all of the horrible things that the "journalists" in question say and do (like "nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission. bring back bullying"). When someone actually does get doxed, the overwhelming reaction is not "fuck yeah, patriarchy" but "what the hell are you doing, idiot?"

The current suspicion is that GNAA (you know, the people that were in the news semi-recently for harassing Kathy Sierra) is behind most of the death threats and doxing. It's like a "double troll" for wackjobs like them: They get an excuse to harass people while another group takes all the flak for it. Everyone's mad!

But hey, that's just my two cents. You can bring on the downvotes now, echo chamber.

Here's the thing. Even if GNAA is trolling everyone, GamerGate is a terrible excuse for letting them continue a reign of terror.

Even if there were corruption in game journalism, video game journalism is so meaninglessly inconsequential that it wouldn't countenance the death threats, doxxing and harassment that is being done under it's aegis.

Do you know anybody who makes purchasing decisions based on how high a score a game reviewer gives it? Do you? It just seems unfathomable to me in a world where we have Steam, Twitch, Project Greenlight, Humble Bundle & indie games galore that video game journalism matters enough that it should be destroyed.

It just seems like Gamergate is bullshit from top to bottom, and it's completely mystifying to me why anyone who loves games should want to identify with it.

>Do you know anybody who makes purchasing decisions based on how high a score a game reviewer gives it?

Not personally, but the stories that the press chooses to report absolutely has an effect on purchasing decisions in the aggregate. I'm not cool with people like Zoe Quinn using their incestuous relationships with the press to get a leg up on other, more deserving indies. You know, people that make good games instead of harassing suicidally depressed people, intimidating photographers, attacking other feminist organizations for competing with her charity, getting "The Most Expensive Game Jam in History" canceled over personal drama, attempting to censor controversy with DMCA takedown notices, and just in general being a professional victim.

Corruption should not be tolerated anywhere, so I'm happy some people actually give a shit and are taking a stand for once instead of forgetting about controversies the next day as usual. I can see people here being upset that others are putting more effort into GamerGate than they do into much more deserving causes like fighting NSA surveillance, but you don't get to choose what people care about.

As for why others care, I guess it's part being tired of being one of the internet's punching bags, part being tired of Silicon Valley yuppies and trustafarians complaining about the "privilege" of a bunch of roughly lower-middle class youth, part seizing a chance to strike out at the loathsome "clickbait" media that everyone else on HN would be condemning in any other scenario, part not wanting to see video games become yet another medium neutered by the cultural marxist PC police, part spite, and part breaking out the popcorn as they watch the other side make complete asses of themselves on blogs and twitter. The last reason is my favorite, it's absolutely hilarious how vile and hypocritical some of these people are.

EDIT: As I've alluded to, I think GamerGate is the start of something akin to the Occupy movements for the left, or the Tea Party movement for the older right. They begin with a frenetic spark, and it can be hard to discern what "they're about," and sometimes people do bad things in their name, but you have to look past the surface to see there is a meaningful sentiment being expressed. Give them time to find their voice and remember that many positive movements had a rocky start.

You seem to believe that Intel can be intimidated by internet trolls. It also seems that you don't know nothing about Phil Fish and that almost (if not all) the awards that Fez won were from the investors of Fez themselves. [don't get me wrong, I actually loved Fez] (let the downvotes pour)

Intel did drop their ads http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/2/6886747/intel-buckles-to-a...

The accusations about Phil Fish, Fez, Polytron's investors, and the IGF judging process are blatantly false. It's a conspiracy theory that's mostly based on misinformation about the IGF voting process and misinterpretation of dates.

http://igf.com/2014/09/igf_statement_re_judging_proce.html

The issue is about IGF lying and you give me a link to an IGF article to prove your point. They have their right to defend themselves, but that doesn't mean that whatever they say in their defense is actually true. Everything should be taken with a grain of salt, and more than one independent report should be taken into consideration when forming an opinion, especially on controversial topics.

Well, there's the small matter that the backers weren't actually on the 2012 jury. [1] And the fact that Fez got its first win before IndieFund existed. [2] And the video that made the original accusation against Phil Fish was taken down, probably because it was a combination of libel and evidence of the illegal hacking. So it's become a source-less accusation that gets trotted out with no evidence to support it, as it was here.

[1] http://theflounce.com/gamergate-seem-understand-ethics-nearl...

[2] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/508734779617849344

I'll reply here because apparently I can't reply to your response. "Because everything that is written on the internet is true". Let's think a little: Intel pulled their ads because they got intimidated by a handful of trolls, yet they didn't returned after it was shown to them that they are supporting misogynists by pulling the ads. Explain to me how a few trolls are more powerful than the media?

Don't think anyone understands a long-running complex topic by giving it a passing glance.

http://techraptor.net/content/understanding-pro-anti-gamerga...

The essential issue, omitted by the summary above, is the aggressive harassment of women and of those who speak out about this problem. Three women (that I know of) have left their homes, fearing for their safety. Many others have had their personal information, such as their addresses, published online. That is what many people object to.

For example, the author of this article,

http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/22/5926193/women-gaming-harass...

... was harassed and threatened to the point that she left her home:

http://kotaku.com/another-woman-in-gaming-flees-home-followi...

Good overview here: http://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-a...

The closest I've seen to neutral coverage is this:

http://www.popehat.com/2014/10/21/gamer-gate-three-stages-to...

I'm not going to claim it's anywhere particularly close to true neutral, however.

An article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/...

A video (Folding Ideas S4E7):

http://blip.tv/foldablehuman/s4e7-gamergate-7071206

In 2037, this exact question will be quoted in a Supreme Appstore verdict on the illegality of tabphlets advocating dodging the interplanetary draft.

Surprisingly, one of the best overviews I've seen was in Reason: http://reason.com/archives/2014/10/12/gamergate-part-i-sex-l...

Unlike most of the other references people tend to cite in answer to questions like yours, they don't have an obvious stake in the matter.

Hrmm looks like someone needs to make some sort of filter that parses tweets and messages for insults and removes them.

It would be nice if HN talked more about technical and other ways to solve the actual problems here, and less repeating the same insults at each other over and over again.

> A Natural A/B Test

Or, as more honest and less conceited people would call it, an anecdote.

I don't think I've ever seen a story with so many dead posts.

EDIT: Everyone is downvote-happy. I'm going to do my best to upvote anyone who was downvoted unfairly.

How is this HN front page worthy? It's just a case study on only two people that ends up making a generalization about countless others. I could make a pro gamer gate statement for all I care, it would still be irrelevant.

I thought better of HN before this. It looks like if you don't toe the line you get downvoted and your comments get [killed].

There's a really good reason for it and it's up to you to figure that part out.

There is no reason to delete a post that presents a rational argument without use of insults or ad hominem attacks, regardless of if you think the viewpoint is "destroying [insert any topical political or current events issue here]".

There's plenty of reason to downvote trolls.

I did not see the posts that were deleted, but so far nothing I've seen in this thread seems like trolling.

I saw all of the dead comments, and my first thought was that the mods had probably done a good job of cleaning up the vitriol. I was curious though, so I enabled showdead, and while I'm not sure that I agree with many of the dead comments, most of them are not noise. It's clear that there has been some emotional voting going on.

I find this very unfortunate to be honest. Instead of allowing dissent, the people here are actively deleting speech that they disagree with. Imagine if a conservative professor at Stanford silenced supporters of Edward Snowden.

I feel the same. I don't think I want to post here anymore. I mean, I should have known that it's not worth discussing politics on HN, but there's something really demoralizing about putting sincere and civil comments together just to have them deleted, all because a few people took their disagreement personally.

When I'm trying to keep it civil here and upvoting people I don't agree with when they make good points, and I get silenced in return, all it does is polarize me further. gg folks, have fun thinking I'm evil/brainwashed/sexist in your echo chamber.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com