By David Futrelle
Regrets, he’s had a few. Last night, the founder of the KotakuInAction subreddit, the hate-filled hangout that has been the main meeting place for Reddit’s angriest gamers since the days of GamerGate, decided to do something he’d been thinking of doing for a long time: he denounced his misbegotten creation as a “cancerous growth” on the internet and closed it down.
Describing the subreddit a huge mistake it was now time to correct, the Redditor known as david-me explained his actions in a long post on the Drama subreddit:
KiA is one of the many cancerous growths that have infiltrated reddit. The internet. The world. I did this. Now I am undoing it. This abomination should have always been aborted.
So in this moment with years of contemplation, I am Stopping it. I’m closing shop and I can’t allow anyone to exploit my handicap. [David-me says he has Generalized Anxiety Disorder and is on the Autism spectrum.] I’ve watched and read every day. Every single day. The mods are good at what they do, but they are moderating over a sub that should not exist.
He blamed Reddit for enabling the shitshow by not cracking down on hate speech.
Reddit and it’s Admins … are the stewards of hate and divisiveness and they let it go. They go so far as to even claim there is nothing they can do about it. …
Don’t let Reddit pretend otherwise. They know what goes on here. They know everything. So either they choose to allow it, or $$$$ makes them.
He went on to call out the equally hateful but much larger The_Donald subreddit as
a viral cancer that is destroying the minds of millions of Reddit users each day; And they allow it. … Conflict breeds users and drives viewer counts, driving advertisers and required profits.
Naturally, Reddit being what it is, site admins moved quickly to restore the subreddit — and it was reportedly up again in less than an hour, according to Polygon.Which kind of, sort of proves david-me’s points, doesn’t it?
The other subreddit mods were not pleased by the shutdown. One of them explained their version of events in a stickied post shortly after the subreddit was restored,
david-me apparently went off the deep end, making a long screed post on another sub about nuking KiA as he made KiA private, kicked the entire mod team, nuked the CSS, and generally made a clusterfuck of things. Thankfully, an amazing admin was online who helped restore everything, and has locked david’s permissions to mail-only while an investigation goes on into the matter later before they decide if anything further needs to be done.
That’s Reddit for you, I guess. As of right now, KiA remains up, and the regulars are happily babbling away about all the attention the shutdown got them and writing huge walls of text on how the whole thing shows that “GamerGate still has momentum.” Which I suppose is true, in that gamer dudes are still harassing female game developers they don’t like and endlessly nattering about those games journalists and publications who have committed the alleged huge ethical breach of disagreeing with them.
Shitty dudes on the internet remain shitty dudes on the internet, news at 11.
If only we could exile them to an island where they could fling poo at each other.
I’m sure they would argue about who had the BEST poo.
It sounds like he’s had a personal epiphany. Which makes me wonder what happened to cause it. Conservatives (and let’s make no mistake, gamergate is very much a right wing phenomenon with only a soupcon of leftist bros for flavor) and as a general rule, the right only realizes something as wrong or bad once it affects them personally. Like the congressman who was virulently homophobic until his son came out as gay.
So, did a close friend of his get doxxed by GG or something? Because I honestly can’t see someone watching the toxic stew of KiA for that long and finally realizing it’s toxic without some sort of shock.
Then there’s Facebook walking back their (what all reasonable people knew was empty) promise to get rid of phony news. Because figuring out whether or not Infowars is real news is just too hard, apparently.
Damn, the man can’t even have control over the subreddit he created? He wants to shut it down, if other people want to still congregate, they can make their own damn subreddits, right?
It’s shit like this, where the very founder of a geek community openly declares that it is based in hate yet the community gets the backing of one of the internet’s most powerful websites, that makes it hard not to tear a metaphorical strip off people who describe Steven universe or other lgbtq+ geeky communities with demonizing superlatives.
Reddit admins a trash and this is a clear example as supporters of nazis and fascists as any.
Wait, why can Reddit do this? Isn’t supposed to be users decisions? This is weird.
@Saint-somnia
If you’ve allowed other users to become mods with equal power you’re kind of screwed.
If he’d maintained sole control, maybe he could have shuttered it. Of course then Kotaku_inaction or something would have popped up and we’d be right back to square one.
Aaand this is why I never signed on to Reddit. They don’t really care if something is trash, as long as it pulls eyeballs to the site (and increases their ad revenues therefrom, natch.) Morality? Decency? Good sense? WTF are those?
btw, this is the same business model facebook uses.
it’s why they refuse to dump the Infowars page, even though it is the very definition of fake news.
don’t believe these social media companies… they lie for a living, literally.
@Bina: We do have a lot of fun in the COMPLETEANARCHY Subreddit. We keep it fairly wholesome, save for a bit of tastelessly humoristic celebration of violence against fascists. The biggest critique would probably be that it can get a bit too much of an Anarchist in-humour-thing.
Celebration of violence against fascists? Now I’m interested! 😛
I’m reminded of a video I watched a short while back about how, since the more time you spend on Facebook, the more ads you see and the more money they make, polarization and controversy (and harassment) is purposefully kept on the site. Looks like it’s the same for Reddit, just to a more blatant extreme.
Someone want to explain to me why this sub is called Kotaku In Action? About 6-8 years ago I used to follow video game news closely and comment on different video game sites. Kotaku was one of them and I don’t remember it being notably terrible either in content or comments. Did Kotaku go off the deep end and become a misogynist cesspit during the whole gamergate fiasco or is the name because of something else?
@ kobun37
Not that I know of. The gaters don’t like Kotaku because someone once wrote a positive review of one of Zoe Quinn’s game on there.
Thename is supposed to be an insult to Kotaku. Kotaku generally espouses progressive politics in its coverage of games. They were critical of Gamergate and the subreddit was created during that movement’s heydey.
I think maybe a Kotaku writer was one of the “five guys” although I could be remembering wrong. They also have writers who occasionally write with a pro social justice slant and they used to be owned by Gawker. Lots of things for reactionaries to rage wank over.
The commenters on the other hand, were often as bad as reddit and 4chan from what I saw.
Reddit admins have started actively propping up the hatred, lovely.
@kobun37
The name is in reference to another subreddit called Tumblr in Action, whose stated aim was to document the hypocrisies and overreactions of Tumblr SJW types (I’m paraphrasing). Kotaku, being a popular video game website that was quite progressive in its politics, and one of the first to cover Gamergate, was therefore a natural target for reactionary blowback. It helped that Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson was also one of the “5 Guys” names by Eric Gjoni as unfairly giving Zoe Quinn positive coverage.
@ColeYote
Started?
@Tovius:
For the sake of accuracy, there was never any review of Quinn’s game, it was simply mentioned in a list of indie games that the author recommended people check out.
@kobun:
If that had happened, the gators would have loved Kotaku.
Someone on Twitter said Reddit can’t ever take any large subreddit down because it’s built that way, it would involve a lot of heavy database operations and the result would amount to a DDoS attack.
They were able to take the incels subreddit down …
What an echo chamber. Extremists like yourselves are causing all social discourse to become increasingly polarized. You’re pushing centrists away with venomous rhetoric and political violence. You are actively assisting with the dismantling of Enlightenment ideals.
Want to know how we got a disgusting joke of a President in Drumph? Have a look in the mirror.
The creator of it has no right to close it down? Wow…