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.
@Patrick_griffen
Lol, if people criticizing you for being a bigot makes you decide you’ll be a bigot (or vote for one) to spite them, you were already a bigot.
Also lol at the idea that people talking about what a cesspit a misogynistic gamer subreddit is directly gave us Trump. The Russians and white supremacy gave us Trump.
The trolls are not sending their best to us anymore, are they?
It’s either sad boner trolls or why won’t you be nice to Nazis? trolls.
BORRRRRRINNNNG.
They’re not exactly sending us their best! They’re sending incels, they’re sending MGTOWs, they’re rapists. We’re going to build a 40 foot wall between 4Chan and the rest of the internet!
(Strange how Trump-style rhetoric suddenly seems sensible when the target is changed to 4Chan and other such online cesspits of misogyny…)
Yeah, if shithole countries actually do exist, they’re the internet nations of 4chan, Reddit, RoK, and Daily Stormer. Not Mexico or Haiti.
If the only thing necessary for a moral, upstanding ‘centrist’ to decide “hey you know what would be a great idea? Throwing in my lot with the fascists!” is that they get criticized and/or mocked online by feminists/liberals/non-racists on a site specifically dedicated to calling out shitty behavior, then humanity is well and truly fucked.
“A woman/minority was MEAAAAN to me once, so I’ve decided that none of them should have any rights anymore” is not a reasonable position to take.
Neither is “well, I WOULD have supported your basic human rights if only you had kissed my ass to the appropriate extent.”
Man… what kinda life do you lead if you’ve devoted yourself to GamerGate of all things for four straight years?
It must be verrrry sad.
Like our latest troll:
Yeah, I don’t tolerate abdication of responsibility. Polarization came from one side and one side only: the one with all the misogynists and the racists and the homophobes harassing people up and down the interwebs. That was all on you. Anita Sarkeesian just made some basic trope analysis videos; it was you who bombarded her with hate for it. Zoe Quinn just made a game about depression; it was you that organized entire campaigns to harass her.
Pointing out awful behaviour is not “extremism.” It’s the awful behaviour itself that is extreme. And Charlottesville laid a pretty stark contrast between those in the right and those in the wrong. You want to be in the wrong, that’s your choice. Own it.
The ironic thing is I wouldn’t know who Anita, Zoe, and Brianna were if it weren’t for these asshats trying to silence them.
@Katamount (in response to Patrick Griffen):
And that is now the first of the new Geek Social Fallacies coined by Captain Awkward a couple weeks ago: https://captainawkward.com/2018/07/02/1120-the-creepy-guy-in-the-friend-group-revisited-four-more-geek-social-fallacies/
Patrick Griffen isn’t even wringing hands over how both sides are equally bad in creating this situation, but simply yelling at people pointing at the nudist Emperor. How very unoriginal.
kupo skrev:
David Gerard has a tag for gator-related hilarity and beclowning, to which I have thoughtfully linked my name, which takes its name from the logical endpoint of their “the more we attack her, the bigger she gets” efforts.