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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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It's a view that's popular among a certain type of reddit user that any sort of moderation is censorship and a violation of their rights. It's why they defended having literal honest to goodness child porn subreddits as "free speech." For some reason, the only thing that warrants deleting is "doxxing." Everything else is permitted.

 

If I were a defender of child porn subreddits, I probably wouldn't want to get doxxed either I guess.

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The thing I always worry about in those cases, though, is that bystanders take withdrawal from conversation as admission of defeat. What I quite liked about that particular example was that quite a few different people were posting links and calling him out on his nonsense, so it didn't all fall on one person to weather his bullshit. Distributing the effort seems like the way to go.

 

I used to worry about these sorts of things, and then I stopped. Now I just try and make my point, and move on with my life. At most I respond to someone responding to me once. I avoid a back and forth. The back and forth isn't worth it. I think of myself as a pretty reasonable person, so I assume other reasonable people will just agree with me, or at a minimum think that I am saying something reasonable, and the person that is being argumentative and unreasonable will appear as such to other people. For example, when Tim Schafer bows out of a twitter conversation where one dude has tweeted at him over 50 times, he hasn't lost, he's just stopped talking to some crazy person.

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I had actually been mostly ignoring this stuff for the last few days except for what I've seen brought up here, but I went back down the rabbit hole over my lunch hour today.

Oh, so apparently another move that I had completely missed is that the gaters are encouraging people to directly complain to advertisers about Polygon, Kotaku and any other site they think are carrying on the agenda of the Feminist Cabal?  It looks like it was born on /v/ but has spread other places:

http://www.donotlink.com/bljk

And some people are claiming a victory (I don't believe this email for a second):

https://twitter.com/Chriss_m/status/509486352174694400

Because an anonymous customer service rep is really going to speak about what their advertising strategy is to a random dude on the Internet that emailed him.

CliffyB pissed some people off:

post-33601-0-93205400-1410462338_thumb.jpg

The FYC continue to triple down on getting press by spreading dirty laundry about Quinn. And once again, no one asks what experience they actually have in producing a video game from start to finish.

http://apgnation.com/archives/2014/09/09/6977/truth-gaming-interview-fine-young-capitalists

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A good argument against the free speech maximalists who want to embrace an ideal that doesn't even exist in American law is this fun little blog post.

 

How many times have you seen a website say "We're not responsible for the content of our comments."? I know that when you webmasters put that up on your sites, you're trying to address your legal obligation. Well, let me tell you about your moral obligation: Hell yes, you are responsible. You absolutely are. When people are saying ruinously cruel things about each other, and you're the person who made it possible, it's 100% your fault. If you aren't willing to be a grown-up about that, then that's okay, but you're not ready to have a web business. Businesses that run cruise ships have to buy life preservers. Companies that sell alcohol have to keep it away from kids. And people who make communities on the web have to moderate them.

 

Sarah Jeong (I think?) has written some good things on the subject too, but I am too lazy to google another article.

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The FYC continue to triple down on getting press by spreading dirty laundry about Quinn. And once again, no one asks what experience they actually have in producing a video game from start to finish.

http://apgnation.com/archives/2014/09/09/6977/truth-gaming-interview-fine-young-capitalists

This strikes me as especially repugnant given that the irc logs literally proved that the 4channers knew Zoe had nothing to do with the doxxing and spread the lies anyway. Dang guys.

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Definitely not worth treating any 4chan related thing with any assumption of good faith.

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This strikes me as especially repugnant given that the irc logs literally proved that the 4channers knew Zoe had nothing to do with the doxxing and spread the lies anyway. Dang guys.

 

I am honestly baffled by how many people have chosen simply to ignore the existence of the logs because they are just too damning to everything they're invested in here.

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I am honestly baffled by how many people have chosen simply to ignore the existence of the logs because they are just too damning to everything they're invested in here.

 

The whole thing is built upon a mountain of misinformation so I don't see why they would start paying attention to any facts.

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The whole thing is built upon a mountain of misinformation so I don't see why they would start paying attention to any facts.

 

Intent really is magic!

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Oops, I said doxxing when I meant DDoSing. 4chan accused Zoe of orchestrating a DDoS attack on TFYC. Either way, my point remains the same. It is incredibly awkward.

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Intent really is magic!

 

More like alchemy. By which I mean spray painting poop gold and insisting that you're rich.

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It's a view that's popular among a certain type of reddit user that any sort of moderation is censorship and a violation of their rights. It's why they defended having literal honest to goodness child porn subreddits as "free speech." For some reason, the only thing that warrants deleting is "doxxing." Everything else is permitted.

 

I don't want to start a free speech argument, but I always think of this

 

free_speech.png

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Pretty much that. There was a fairly awkward AMA where the three people associated with the campaign weren't able to answer any basic questions about why they needed money, what the money would be used for or what their plan was.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/2feuyz/attorney_representing_goodgamersus_ama/

Also, the new "ethical" gaming news site that was born from gamerghazi is supposed to start posting today. That should be interesting.

http://www.goodgamers.us/

They really missed an opportunity to have goodgamers.cool. Or maybe coolgamers.cool.

 

Oh thanks. That was an entertaining read. I would also have a lot more respect for them if it were goodgamers.cool. or coolgames.cool. coolcoolcool.cool. That last one is available. I'm tempted.

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I am honestly baffled by how many people have chosen simply to ignore the existence of the logs because they are just too damning to everything they're invested in here.

Something interesting about that, though, is that the claims that Anita/Zoe/Phil doxxed themselves have completely disappeared from the dialogue. Other than that, though, it seems to be the same ol' shit.

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I don't think it's something that's necessarily taught among most of them. I think instead that there's a certain type of person who wants conversation to be more mechanistic, with some kind of system for resolving disagreements, and a conceptual model wherein the first side to say something that could be interpreted as a fallacy is wrong or at least bears the burden of proof fills that role perfectly.

I don't think it's so much mechanistic as it is reflecting the way stuff is argued in a more academic setting. And twitter is a really bad place to discuss anything with nuance so people end up boiling everything to jargon. Of course that's probably giving a lot of benefit of the doubt too, since there is a certain amount of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" going on.

Rather than just saying "straw man", people need to say "you are misrepresenting my argument in this way". Just saying a fallacy without saying where it occurs is a lazy distraction. Also, they get a lot of mileage by spouting 'appeal to authority', since it allows them to disregard any evidence as to how the actual professional world of journalism operates.

 It's a lazy distraction and is actually it's own fallacy. The Argument from Fallacy I think the instinct of questioning appeals to authority is healthy, but it's not enough, especially when talking about professionally vetted journalism. That's the same mistake that climate change deniers make when they refuse to believe scientists. 

 

This is a problem that affects all festivals and curation processes at the moment, I think. It certainly does affect my work, and I've seen that exact bias in my own selections (especially as they're selected to thrive on a showfloor).

 

I think A MAZE are the only people I've seen really buck this and show a really challenging set of games, but they've developed the kind of mostly-but-not-entirely-developer audience required for that kind of lineup to go well.

I think that's probably in part related to the issue I mentioned earlier, with festivals not dividing up games into enough categories. Certain kinds of games are simply not well suited to festivals, and certain kinds of games. Games are all still kind of lumped into one big bag still, and having specific categories to compete in would allow certain kinds of games that would otherwise get overlooked a chance to shine. 

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I think their whole manifesto opens them up to bad things.

Good point.

 

It's a view that's popular among a certain type of reddit user that any sort of moderation is censorship and a violation of their rights. It's why they defended having literal honest to goodness child porn subreddits as "free speech." For some reason, the only thing that warrants deleting is "doxxing." Everything else is permitted.

I guess I must be kind of out of touch with the Internet. Sounds pretty stupid.

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Following on from the comments about website moderation is the speech/article that cemented a lot of these ideas about group-forming: A Group is its Own Worst Enemy. I link this basically every opportunity I get because a: it's been ten years and it's still new to people and b: it talks about people who start up websites with radical inclusion and then are shocked when they're populated by assholes - and explains how this is inevitable.

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So the welcome letter to the launch of goodgamers includes this:
 

First of all, I want to say that I am constantly in awe of you, gaming community.   The way we have all banded together during this has been so incredibly heart-warming I can not even begin to express my feelings.   Somehow, in the middle of all of this, we began to make a real difference in our little corner of the internet, and beyond:

 

I'm just...fucking speechless. 

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