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Comment by Chaebixi | Hacker News Reader

> Just for the record: GamerGate was 100% founded on harassing women. The "ethics in games journalism" thing was only ever a front to build popular support, which unfortunately worked. I'm happy to post more details if you're unconvinced.

GamerGate wasn't coordinated enough and lacked the centralized leadership to have been "founded" for a purpose or be a "front" to achieve specific clandestine goals.

From what I gather, it was sort of like Occupy Wall Street in that there was really no there there besides a vague ethos shared by the people who took up its flag to pursue their disparate pet causes.

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Saying that GamerGate lacked leadership is wrong. It had multiple important figureheads that directed the movement over time, starting with Eron who turned a personal affair into an open-internet vendetta under the guise of 'ethics in video games' (of which the reviews and corruption people claim simply does not exist).

It blew up from there as many people became leaders of multiple subsections of GamerGate, many of whom we see today in the alt-right parts of the internet which I am sure is entirely coincidental. The difference between Occupy Wall Street and GamerGate is that GamerGate rallied behind multiple different leaders which would push the the movement towards various directions. This was all stuff I saw from personal experience.

Eron posted a blog post venting about how his ex-girlfriend who was being held up as a feminist success story had treated him in an abusive manner as well as cheated on him.

He did nothing to direct Gamergate, most of what I saw him post in the early days was trying to put the cat back in the bag.

Both of those statements would be objectively wrong. The first being that not only did he shop around the story at multiple places, but he ended up posting it on 4chan and the like because he knew it would be the perfect place to incite trolls. He was banned from multiple forums due to posting his rants.

The second was that he was constantly active in various chat channels encouraging and pushing the movement forward while lying about his claims that he was trying to back away from it.

That is interesting, I didn't know that Eron posted it on 4Chan. Any evidance for that? I know it first went out on Tumbler and was posted to SA and Penny Arcade: https://actionagogo.com/2014/09/09/a-narrative-of-gamergate-...

http://antinegationism.tumblr.com/

I would also be interested in seeing any logs of Eron in the chat servers, I was never on those so I only saw what was posted to Reddit.

https://idledillettante.com/2014/12/06/eron-gjoni-hateful-bo...

This blogpost from 2014 has multiple examples of Eron posting under a trip on 4chan as well IRC logs.

Thank you, I was there in the beginning and I had seen the nastiness on both sides. I don't see where it was Eron who originally posted on 4chan but it does look like he did respond to the 4chan thread.

The author of that post says that Eron abused Zoe but has not provided any evidence, do you know of anything to back that up? All the evidence that Eron posted was never denied by Zoe afik.

> (of which the reviews and corruption people claim simply does not exist).

It is a well known fact that game companies pay people to write positive reviews.

One example (Microsoft): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeHjN4oWVfk

Yes, that aspect of corruption I agree exists.

However, that was not the claims of corruption and reviews made during the course of GamerGate (ie that Zoe had slept with reviewers for positive coverage). None of GamerGate dealt with the actual issues of corporate influence on reviews and the policies thereof.

/s/founded/formed

Now, is the rest of the statement true?

> Now, is the rest of the statement true?

No, clearly not. There are a lot more problems with the paragraph than can be solved by a simple substitution.

The root problem is that it's very hard (almost impossible) to make statements about the whole of an uncoordinated, loosely defined group that are both specific and true. Also, when you think you can easily make such statements, it probably doesn't mean that you're right but rather your thinking is being driven by biases and group-prejudice.

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