Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

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If you, like me, or tptacek [1], were confused why this is a big deal, that's because it's not. It's common practice for online articles to be changed after they are published, especially as new information comes in. If the article originally contained factually incorrect information that was later corrected that would be one thing, but that's not the case with this article; new information and context was added.

TechRaptor, the site that hosts the article, is strongly associated with the GamerGate community, and that is the source of this concern of this new non-existent "danger". Standing up for "ethical journalism" was and continues to be one of GamerGate's most popular smoke screens. In this case, the NYT article was modified to include context that TechRaptor author didn't like. However, it doesn't look good to say "no, this totally wasn't about the fact that Ellen Pao was a woman" because that's easily disprovable: there are a trillion and a half Reddit threads out there displaying some of the nastiest sexist invective you've seen in a long time, all targeted at Ellen Pao. Instead, TechRaptor attempts to attack the article via a sidechannel discreditation. It attacks an unrelated feature of the article (that it was modified after it was published), which casts a pall over the entire thing, effectively undermining the main argument simply by association.

There is a ton of talk in this discussion thread about how the NYT article is "biased" or trying to present an "opinion". This seems to me like just another way of disagreeing with the argument without seeming like you're disagreeing with it. Claiming that this should be reported on like any other CEO being fired is not a cry for journalistic integrity, it's a request to willfully ignore the very, very special context that this firing took place in. The behavior of the Reddit community during this process, a behavior that was blatantly sexist and clearly occurred at an outsized volume and level of rancor because Ellen Pao was a woman, cannot and should not be ignored. To do so would be, well, unethical.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=9870891

> Standing up for "ethical journalism" was and continues to be one of GamerGate's most popular smoke screens.

This is very unfair and uninformed statement to make about GG.

Most important thing to know about GG is that there are many images of GG circulating around. For some people GG is internet hate campaign. For others its political movement. For others its protest of trends on game scene. For others its outrage about reporting on poor releases or cliques in gaming media. Finally there are people who are just exploiting whole thing for internet fame they can capitalise from down the lane.

So quite obviously everybody finds the thing he/she seeks in GG, and so we have number of people attacking other people in different ways under different pretenses, like "IGN sold out!" or "GooberGaters chased girl out of her house!" naturally followed by "they didn't, they display game ads because they are gaming site" or "girl didn't run anywere, reporting her escape off her house's sofa all the time" retorts.

The greatest tragedy here is that there's whole lot of people with binary perception amounting to "with us or against us" who can't tolerate the tought that there may be valid points raised by other side, and thus dismissing (or more often flaming) either Adrian Chmielarz or Anita Sarkesian voices simply because they are on wrong side.

I sympathize with your plea for us to move beyond labels, but that doesn't change the nature of this TechRaptor piece.

This is a smoke screen and it is being used in the same old way to obliquely discredit an argument that a member of the GG community doesn't like. And the argument being discredited is, once again, about the status of women in tech and on the Internet. Far from being an "unfair" characterization -- it's depressingly apt here.

> If you, like me, or tptacek [1], were confused why this is a big deal, that's because it's not.

Ah yes, because you two are certainly the authorities on the matter.

> Standing up for "ethical journalism" was and continues to be one of GamerGate's most popular smoke screens.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. It's getting stale that the diverse group of people associated along with GamerGate are merely harassers: you know that isn't true.

Downvoted. You use scare quotes and have to link to someone else's post in an attempt to add weight to your clearly weak argument, make no attempt to add evidence to your points and eventually fallback on claiming thinly-veiled harassment and misogyny. Absolutely no legs to stand on.

For some reason, your particular group of people cannot have a real discussion about ethics without dismissing it all together and then dropping your boogeyman term "GamerGate".

Why do you think that is?

I'm going to go with "because the loudest people who chose to adopt the label 'GamerGate' also managed to spoil the word 'ethics', so that in discussions of interest to 'GamerGaters', readers have to be cautious about whether there are actual ethical concerns, rather than fig leaves used to promote misogyny."

Whatever you might think of the issues "GamerGate" advocates for, another indisputable fact is that its troll faction very definitely turned the words "ethics in journalism" into a punch line. So much so that simply saying the words "ethics in journalism" is very effective code for "this is really about misogyny".

This is disappointing because I think you're smarter than this.

A running joke, "ethics in journalism", by detractors and the very same "journalists" being criticized for ethical transgressions is not effective for anything, besides perpetuating the "this is really about misogyny" meme.

If one is "cautious", one can certainly do their due diligence to investigate this matter and learn that reporting on games, tech and all sorts of other journalism really are cause for ethical concerns.

I'm aware you don't care about games or game reportage, but I'll cite a few examples anyway: take corrupt "journalists", such as Nathan Grayson (http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson) or Jenn Frank (http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=jenn_frank) who collude, fail to disclose relationships and give favorable coverage and reviews to friends.

By the way, trolls and shit-stirrers are not the "loudest people" nor do they represent a label. No amount of Twitter reweets, likes and favorites will make that a reasonable argument.

It's kind of a big deal. Real and ongoing issues with male-supremacy and misogyny in SV are being actively misappropriated for salacious clickbait. C.f. Newsweek's horrific cover story with a mouse lifting a woman's skirt.

C.f. the title "SV 2, Ellen Pao 0". I mean jesus, talk about derailing the convo from the start. Ellen Pao blew it with the Victoria firing, so there's at least one thread of this story that has nothing to do with sexism and everything to do with typical tone-deaf executives.

I personally don't think the FPH incident is involved in her dismissal, nor her previous harrassment lawsuit -- if the latter was a problem they would have never made her CEO in the first place. Regarding FPH, yes that ruffled feathers but the management seemed united behind it.

So, I don't think it's anti-feminist to call out this article as gender-wars clickbait. The focus on edits is indeed a sideshow, but I'm not surprised it took a GG-focused site to bring it up.

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