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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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Newest article hitting number 1 on /r/games:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/09/gamergate_explodes_gaming_journalists_declare_the_gamers_are_over_but_they.html

 

This whole #gamergate thing is just because journalists are lashing out at their audience because the youtubers are taking over.

 

Not enough sighs in the world.

 

Apparently the press was supposed to turn the other cheek together as one while several of their number were brutally attacked on entirely baseless grounds. How does that happen, exactly? Do they all start writing gentle but chiding articles, saying that they know their detractors have good intentions and that they'll defend to the death the rights of some to slander them and the rights of the rest to stand aside doing nothing?

 

Honestly, I'm almost done being shocked by all of this. What #GameGhazi has proven to me is that the vast majority of the reading public and even a small minority of journalists have no idea how journalism is done, but have very high standards for it nonetheless.

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Man I generally try to read Jenn Frank articles and enjoy her writing. I do hope she comes back at a later date after this stuff changes for the better, which I know it will. I don't know of Mattie but I hope she comes back as well.

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These articles were additionally unseemly because gamers were being preached to by the very same people who have been commodifying them. 

 

Throughout the article he accuses games journalists of wrongdoing, but praises youtubers for very much the same actions.  Man that article is a mess.

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Really hate that I am tagged in that guy's stupid tweet. I keep seeing notifications of it being faved by like-minded jerks.

 

I got tagged on a lot of scumbag posts after Jim Sterling retweeted me and his lovely band of critics saw fit to respond. It was not good times.

 

Displaying my Twitter ignorance here, so if someone tags you in a shitty or harassing post, you continue to get notifications about it?  So it guarantees you get to keep being reminded about it until it fades from notice?

 

Also, right before that guy replied, Burch did make a comment about some of these guys being "sex deprived."  On one hand, I think there is likely some truth there, that some men who lash out online like this do so because of a lack of relationships.  But it's also the kind of inflammatory language I hate seeing used by our side, as it is seen as being an excuse to be shitty back, and examples like that are used to try and paint our side as being as shitty and hateful as their side (I don't think that's true, but the feedback loop is perpetuating that idea).  I'm not sure I have a major point here, just trying to parse my own thoughts on how to discuss or react to this shit without acting like them or contributing to their own paranoid conspiracies.

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People going after Burch's relationship status reminds me:

I read a facebook post earlier, by a woman who pointed out that a lot of this is about policing womens behaviour. The ones who stay quiet aren't being attacked. Other comments on the post were women who are deeply annoyed at having been complemented for being "calm" and "rational" in the past for, basically, not speaking up about bad things or not speaking their minds.

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Yeah, here's an example of that (not harassment, but the notifications) - 

 

lc0snMR.png

 

So if someone harasses a person that was replying to something you posted at some point along the line, you get notifications every time that tweet is retweeted or favorited.

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Gross.  Can you unsubscribe from notifications for specific Tweets? 

 

Yeah, I believe you can mute them but it's a relatively new feature. Also, it's not something that comes to mind immediately because you also do get some good responses intermixed at times but it's a crapshoot in total.

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I don't see what's so wrong with the premise of that Slate article. I'm partially colour blind and I find youtubers more frequently and more efficiently talking about that subject while they're playing games than writers for the enthusiasts press by the nature of their medium. The only person who seems to regularly do so that I follow regularly that is a writer is Jeff Gerstmann buthe only does so on his podcast or in a quicklook for which it might as well be on youtube or in many cases is on youtube. 

 

There are articles that write about the subject but by and large they're not written about certain games unless to reiterate a press release the company sent out that a colour blind mode was added to the game. I'm almost certain that there are a host of different special interests being served by youtubers/streamers that writers are not that I'm not part of and can't see how that doesn't cause antagonism from writers to this new media. You listen to writers talk about the explosion of youtube onto the scene and the fear is constantly present, so yeah I don't see what's wrong with the premise of that article.

 

That said, I don't see why he distinguishes between enthusiast press and youtubers, they're all enthusiasts to me but that's a matter of semantics that's superfluous.

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What's wrong with the article isn't, "youtubers are popular", it's the characterization of the last two weeks as just a result of journalists, jelous of youtube, to take out their rage on their audience.

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Where are you getting the impression that traditional games press is afraid (you said fear) of YouTubers? The only thing I've seen regarding that relationship is that traditional press sometimes reports on how YouTubers are paid for coverage of games and how that's a threat to ethical journalism, which is substantiated and valid.

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I don't know much (anything at all, really) about Anthony Burch, but after his Twitter rant last night, I'm rapidly becoming a fan.  He used to write for Destructoid, before leaving to enter development, and eventually wrote two of the DLCs for Borderlands 2, which Destructoid reviewed, and about which no one has said a word. 

 

Also, going through some of his previous stuff, ran across a discussion about what if you treated sex like speedrunner's treat games. 

 

Also, also he's apparently in an open relationship, which critics are trying to use to mock him, which is going hilariously badly for them. 

Thanks for the head's up. Amazing rant that will do sadly little. But at the very least an entertaining read.

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I don't really have anything to add to this conversation that hasn't already been said better by either someone here or in the various linked articles, but the topic of twitter did remind me of a video Jenn Frank sent out earlier today that was just 7 seconds of her twitter notifications. It was a literal blur of garbage (admittedly too quick to tell if they were even positive or negative)...I can't imagine how anyone deals with that. Seems like it would render the service entirely useless. And if they are mostly negative, who wouldn't want to give up on that shit. Phil Fish probably has the right idea.

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The really frustrating thing is that this is largely an orchestrated action of 4chan, which has been behind this harassment for weeks, back when it was just targeted at Zoe Quinn. There are screenshots of 4chan posts planning the whole #NotYourShiled tag as a "special jamming op" to have minority posters (and people who are experienced "shitposters" who with fake accounts) join together to undermine "Social Justice Warriors" in gaming. Which apparently means women in game journalism and anyone who defends them or points out how strange it is that they only seem to go after women.

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I don't really have anything to add to this conversation that hasn't already been said better by either someone here or in the various linked articles, but the topic of twitter did remind me of a video Jenn Frank sent out earlier today that was just 7 seconds of her twitter notifications. It was a literal blur of garbage (admittedly too quick to tell if they were even positive or negative)...I can't imagine how anyone deals with that. Seems like it would render the service entirely useless. And if they are mostly negative, who wouldn't want to give up on that shit. Phil Fish probably has the right idea.

 

Further to that, while anyone can block and report for "spam" (in which case I'm pretty sure the report just gets ignored unless it reaches some ridiculous critical mass), reporting for abuse requires that you personally be the target of the abuse, otherwise they explicitly tell you they will not even read it. To add insult to injury, apparently they have some sort of hard cap on the number of reports for abuse you can make and Zoe Quinn hit that limit at day 3 of her ordeal and the limit hasn't been refreshed since then. Twitter apparently doesn't give a shit at all.

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Apparently, people with verified accounts have had success reporting abuse for a third-party. But the blatant preferential treatment given to verified accounts really doesn't help either, as rallying those people to help is practically impossible.

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I forget where it was pointed out recently, but the most profitable thing for Twitter seems to be allowing harassers to largely run free, then having just enough of a sop in place for their targets that they don't desert the platform. Edit: That sounds like a hard thing to balance in practice, but I guess you can bank on people's social networks keeping them there more than abuse is likely to scare most away.

 

I've been in a few discussions today with people looking for an alternative, fed up of a platform that systemically enables harassers.

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App.net?

 

Is that still a thing? Does it still cost money? Is it still basically Twitter?

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Further to that, while anyone can block and report for "spam" (in which case I'm pretty sure the report just gets ignored unless it reaches some ridiculous critical mass), reporting for abuse requires that you personally be the target of the abuse, otherwise they explicitly tell you they will not even read it. To add insult to injury, apparently they have some sort of hard cap on the number of reports for abuse you can make and Zoe Quinn hit that limit at day 3 of her ordeal and the limit hasn't been refreshed since then. Twitter apparently doesn't give a shit at all.

 

This is in my opinion the biggest problem with social media.  Many of these companies have stated publicly that the harassment they see is a widespread, community problem but refuse to meaningfully address the community in trying to find a solution.  This irks me particularly, since the excuse is typically these people are just 'misusing' the service and can only be dealt with on a case by case basis.  Not to mention, as horrible as this stuff is, it pushes more traffic to those communities so there isn't much motivation to do any more than the bare minimum.  It's a style of program design that sees no bad programs, only bad users, and it's a lie.

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I tried standing up to them on Twitter. It went... poorly.

It's a very special feeling to be shouted down by randos on Twitter, with 30+ notifications per minute, where most of the people derating you have accounts that mysteriously are only 3 days old yet have over 1000 #GamerGate #NotYourShiled posts.

I'm going to step away from Twitter and take a shower for a bit. Possibly while drinking a bottle of whiskey.

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Where are you getting the impression that traditional games press is afraid (you said fear) of YouTubers? The only thing I've seen regarding that relationship is that traditional press sometimes reports on how YouTubers are paid for coverage of games and how that's a threat to ethical journalism, which is substantiated and valid.

I've consistently seen journalists from many of the larger sites, Gamespot, IGN, Polygon*(I originally said Idle Thumbs here but that was a typo, I think I'm getting acclimated to Danielle being on the show regularly), Giantbomb talking about this very topic on podcasts and such. I believe the words Patrick Klepek used to talk about it were something to the effect, "I felt like I needed to learn how to stream because my job will depend on it in the coming years, because the written word is slowly going away."

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I tried standing up to them on Twitter. It went... poorly.

It's a very special feeling to be shouted down by randos on Twitter, with 30+ notifications per minute, where most of the people derating you have accounts that mysteriously are only 3 days old yet have over 1000 #GamerGate #NotYourShiled posts.

I'm going to step away from Twitter and take a shower for a bit. Possibly while drinking a bottle of whiskey.

 

Yeah...I'm not much of a twitter user to begin with but I'd be terrified to involve myself in these conversations. Which I suppose is the problem.

 

Here's the vine that I mentioned before: vine.co/v/OuMOZvWnWJY

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Yeah...I'm not much of a twitter user to begin with but I'd be terrified to involve myself in these conversations. Which I suppose is the problem.

 

Here's the vine that I mentioned before: vine.co/v/OuMOZvWnWJY

 

Oh god, yeah, I saw that one. I can only imagine the toll it takes on a person, especially when it happens over the course of weeks. Anita Sarkeesian must be made of titanium.

I didn't get any death threats this time*, but then again, I'm not showing the utter audacity of disagreeing while being a woman.

* My team did get plenty of death threats when we were working on Fallout 3, including at least one very graphic comic. Eastern Europe takes its Fallout very seriously, but not as seriously as 4chan seems to take its misogyny.

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Oh god, yeah, I saw that one. I can only imagine the toll it takes on a person, especially when it happens over the course of weeks. Anita Sarkeesian must be made of titanium.

I didn't get any death threats this time*, but then again, I'm not showing the utter audacity of disagreeing while being a woman.

* My team did get plenty of death threats when we were working on Fallout 3, including at least one very graphic comic. Eastern Europe takes its Fallout very seriously, but not as seriously as 4chan seems to take its misogyny.

 

My awful first thought was "Wait, there was acutally someone that didn't like Fallout 3?"

 

In all seriousness, I can barely handle reading that stuff said about other people.  I can't imagine it being a part of my daily life.

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