Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[Potato]

How much of her legal knowledge she posts do you think comes from this security guard? My eyes are opening to whole new possibilities.

edit: haha jk probably the first time she talked to him after the pharmacist suggested it

Don't lie, we know you've already doxxed the security guard. What's his social security number? Asking for my Nigerian friend.

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

if you don't mind me asking. How was her address discovered? Did she post it online in the past and tried to scrub any trace of it later down the line?

[kaleidoscopium]

Must include her fetishization of animals somehow

[benji]

if you don't mind me asking. How was her address discovered? Did she post it online in the past and tried to scrub any trace of it later down the line?

If you know somebody's name their address is already online and has been. Especially if they're registered to vote.

Since I don't vote I've never changed my registered address.

[Potato]

Not reading but enjoy:

Subsequently, I don't really care about that 5% in any notable manner. Plenty of Black folks shame these people, call them coons, and get Schadenfreude at their inevitable misfortune in a white supremacist system, and largely there isn't really a belief that the act of denigrating conservative voting patterns and beliefs is inherently anti-Black when it's being aimed at a Black person on those grounds specifically. So to me, decolonizing Gaza should ideally have no more of an inherent strain of bigotry than decolonizing South Africa; if the latter is not anti-white on those grounds, it should follow that the former is not antisemitic on those grounds. These conflicts involve death, but the death isn't inherently predicated on the identity of the person performing the oppression. That is the framework and headspace I was posting in, and I learned quickly that this is an outright cultural disconnect.

I'm glad nep managed to add that killing white farmers is cool with her

It's a step up from babies to be sure

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

[benji]

Not reading but enjoy:

I'm glad nep managed to add that killing white farmers is cool with her

It's a step up from babies to be sure

Oh, no, their babies have to go too.

[Potato]

Solid apology Nep. There are a lot of topics here I try to avoid because I'm not as knowledgeable or well spoken as many here and I don't want to have a post of mine be viewed in a negative light or get me banned just because I couldn't convey my point accurately; some posts I straight up delete before posting because of the anxiety I get from a post that I think could be misconstrued. You made a mistake by not avoiding such a situation this one time, but it happens (even when we're trying to be careful).

For someone to doxx you for it and bring this crap into your real life though was way out of line and I'm sorry for all the hell you've gone through because of it. Same goes to the other mods who've had these events affect their life outside of this forum.

I still don't like how mods have gone about banning, and especially permabanning, a ton of posters over all this, nor do I think this site should continue to be punished (by keeping the OT closed) for the actions of a discord that is not a part of this site. I think most here would like you all to reconsider such actions (reopening that thread, unbanning a number of posters who weren't apart of the doxxing situation) once things start to settle, but I won't fault moderation if they take some time for their mental health before tackling this.

If this is true, you need to find a better community.

Holy fucking shit.

[benji]

Finally, someone who GETS IT:

[benji]

Is "people who oppose Joe Biden support a rapist, racist, fascist" enough characters for me to post?

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

[Potato]

For the record, I doubt they will bother but if she persists and the police do contact the forum about my felonious Google Maps usage I will post their message and my reply here.

Actually, you know what, I'll write something up right now so that the community can be part of the process:

I apologize for wasting police resources and your personal time on this nonsense though I would say it speaks well of your care for your community to investigate such a matter.

Ms. Anderson is an administrator of a purported video game forum. My forum, and our community, exists mostly for the basis of mocking or criticizing said forum (and its predecessor) and has existed for nearly two decades. The admins and moderators on the former have tended to be vindictive and petty towards criticism or mockery which created the purpose of our community. It is all meaningless online stupidity, our community especially views this mostly as amusing ourselves in free time even if we may be passionate about certain topics that come up in the process.

Ms. Anderson on her forum regularly claims to be a knife-carrying ACAB activist who attends armed police abolition meetings in the Atlanta area, advocates for mass property crime or general ethnic-based violence and more broadly for the violent overthrow of the rule of law practically everywhere on the planet. My posting a small image of her parents house from Google Maps* was to juxtapose her forum persona and the "dignified life" in the relatively nice suburbs she claims she is being denied by a vague conspiracy which justifies the calls for violence. There was zero purpose to intimidate except in the sense it may cause her to be reluctant to spin such far fetched tales in the future not that I expect that. It was critical in the "lol can you believe this" sense rather than any anger as I pity not hate Ms. Anderson for her willful ignorance.

I do not expect and will not endorse anything illegal posted on my forum and I especially will always push back against any kind of advocacy of violence against someone for their speech let alone nearly all other instances. I simply do not expect the latter from our community which is mostly laid back, self-critical and joking rather than hateful, angry and spiteful like Ms. Anderson's. (I also do not expect the former but allow for a potential accident by a member unaware of the law and which I would respond to.)

*Viewable here for ease and confirmation: https://thebore.net/re/nepenthehouse.png

Feel free to suggest any changes other than asking that it be called a "hookup knife."

I would add something to the effect of, "My intention when posting the picture of Ms Anderson's parent's house and other comments about Ms Anderson was not to intimidate, but merely to ridicule her based on her many ludicrous public statements on her website and on other public forums such as X (formerly Twatter)."

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

No, you need 20 or 25 words.

Joe Biden supports a rapist, racist, and fascist regime. Bibi's government and his IDF have done that and more to the poor Palestinian people. I think it's worth the US suffering 4 years with Trump to tell the Democrats that there are repercussions for their support of a criminal genocidally corrupt government.

[Greatness Gone]

Benji’s message really needs a variant of “take a carrot, leave a carrot” worked in there somehow.

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

Benji’s message really needs a variant of “take a carrot, leave a carrot” worked in there somehow.

[Averon]

Nep's as subtle as a jackhammer. Any alt she'd make would be easily discovered.

[Potato]

Nep's as subtle as a jackhammer. Any alt she'd make would be easily discovered.

They didn't have the balls to call out her antisemitism nor action it. They won't for her alt.

[benji]

BAN 👏 CANADA 👏

[Nintex]

Finally, someone who GETS IT:

Don't listen to this nasty woman. She'll ruin everything we've worked for with this perfect campaign strategy. If Joe also said transphobe over and over again we'd lose everything
 

[benji]

Reported. Probably won't do anything but fuck em. Leave people alone.

If there wasn't a bigger indication at how unimportant their "concerns" ever are, it's this. They want to influence others because they know most people wouldn't care otherwise.

Large swaths of the community areas are a trashfire and Valve should be ashamed. Considering they facilitate things as plainly illegal as unregulated online gambling, what's a harassment campaign or two anyway. No standards.

It will never make sense to me the lengths people go to defend Valve/Steam given how long shit like this has been going on.

There is probably Valve employees that are part of the communities as well. Didn't the leaks we have gotten over the years paint Valve as being a pretty toxic place to work if you don't fit into one of the big groups?

Gabe owns multiple yachts and embodies everything that goes into being an unethical billionaire, including moving to a remote island and having end of the world survival scenarios.

Cuz Vakve is led by a libertarian white man whose a billionare and would let the world burn if it meant he could buy a new yacht

Valve are garbage but hey! Steam sale!! Fucking lol

Because as long as it doesn't effect them financially they're fine with it.

Yeah, it's this. The poisonous tech bro mindset that is supposed to be about 'freedom' but in truth it's about avoiding the work and responsibility that comes with operating a platform.

Steam can do whatever it pleases as people will still flock to it, and even defend it, as it's the only real choice for PC gaming at the moment.

I'd be surprised if it was purely that they got attention off harassment. If they wanted to create harassment, they could probably do an even better job than they're doing.

My thinking has always been something like this. Tech companies have long viewed themselves as superior to traditional companies, not because they're any better for people, but because they were leaner and more effective businesses than long established and more heavily regulated sectors like banks. That's where the tech sector and libertarian ideology intersect.

Of course, a big part of why the tech sector was less regulated than things like banking was because they're newer, and eventually lawmakers realize they're there and start coming up with regulation, which includes ways in which it would responsibly be regulated in order to prevent harm. Since being unregulated is such a major part of their advantage, they try to resist it all they can, and try to pretend that they're still capable of acting as an agile and informal small company even as they become very large.

Valve is the epitome of this sort of thinking. If memory serves, their customer service was infamously garbage for a long time since they refused to actually hire anyone to specifically do customer service, because that would require making them a bigger and less agile company, so instead they just had the people who did other things at the company like design new features occasionally hopping on to do customer service when they felt like it. They just let this very basic part of their business go to shit so they could keep larping as a cool, hyperefficient startup.

They want to have a platform where people talk about the games they sell so that they can call it a cool feature and their community will encourage more game sales without Valve having to actually do anything more than keep it running. But the reality of having a platform that's open to everyone is that people will abuse that platform. They're going to bully each other, they're going to do hate speech, they're going to distribute child abuse material, they're going to do all sorts of things that Valve would need to spend energy to resolve.

So, the solution for Valve is to insist that actually this is all okay. This is how it's supposed to be. It's good that it's like this. Maybe they'll put some effort towards a tech solution where they don't have to do anything because the work is crowdsourced from their userbase. They absolutely cannot actually commit to caring about the issue, because any investment they put into solving it is investment that they'd rather put into making a better product so they can make even more money.

They'll be good at stopping things that are outright illegal, though, because while tech firms are willing to stand up and declare how they shouldn't be responsible for anything they're not totally unaware of their reality. If there's actually a force like a government who is willing and able to strongarm them and stop them from doing business, any principle of free speech absolutism they claim to have is going to go out the window, because it's not about free speech. It's about doing business as well as they can, and that's the one thing they won't compromise.

They will remove anything that gets them enough bad press.

It has to cross a line where it will cost them more business to remove it than removing it would get them. The Game Developer story is likely moving that needle.

The curator thing was a fun experiment but needs an actual vérification program

Conspiracy theories is a big part of fascism. The enemy (Marxists, Jews etc) is always plotting and conspiring to indoctrinate the people.

I think these people are ridiculous, but how is it materially different than Kid Rock shooting at (unopened) beer cans?

Right-wingers are performatively "boycotting" brands and companies constantly. Even the Keza MacDonald article a few days back was extremely light on specifics, and mostly referred to the more substantial horrible things that happened when GamerGate first arose.

Apologies if there is some solid shit happening here that I'm not aware of. I've read the thread and MacDonald article and it's possible I've missed something.

The point that I'm making is that--so far--this feels like typical right wing whining that makes a bunch of noise until they find a new target to complain about and move on (thankfully), rather than the genesis of something fundamentally new.

It's kinda embarrassing to admit to nowadays, but I was slowly inching down a similar pipeline back in my late teens/early 20s. I can't say why for certain, but I think it was a mix of a shitty home life, abusive childhood, lack of any kind of self confidence, lack of any real/close friends/connections, and perhaps most predominantly of all, being scared. I was desperate to not feel afraid, and I unironically thought if I was "one of the good ones", I could be accepted by people that would otherwise despise me.

I mostly got myself out of it, realising it wasn't doing me any favours and if anything, I was even more miserable than I had been and prone to getting irritated at anything that I had been "told" to be discontent with, like some Pavlovian dog or something - not really thinking about why these things were making me upset in the first place. It was when I started to seriously ask myself why that I started to crawl back up from that pipeline. It probably helped that I already fundamentally disagreed with a lot of right wing ideology though, and part of me just kinda fooled myself into believing they really did just care about "ethics in gaming journalism" (massive lol), despite all the blatant lies and made up "scandals".

Perhaps a decent way to gradually de-radicalise someone is to ask them why they believe the things they do, really make them question themselves. But it isn't easy, and cognitive biases will often prevent people from really trying to consider other perspectives, or the fact they could be wrong. Sometimes just sowing the seeds is enough though and maybe they'll come out of the rabbit hole much later on. That being said, I wouldn't recommend engaging with these kinds of people most of the time. A lot are dead set on never self reflecting, never changing, always strawmanning their "opponents" - there's no point wasting your time or energy on them, especially when so many of them thrive on engagement (just look at the trolls we've already had in this thread).

All this being said, I don't know if it's just because I'm more cognizant of their tactics and dog whistles now, but I have no idea how anyone really falls for the kind of manufactured outrage still coming out of gamergate/"anti-woke" chuds, like this Sweet Baby thing. It's so insanely asinine that I just don't get how anyone can seriously believe "yeah, this singular consultant company is the evil illuminati pulling all the strings and making modern games WOKE!". Though, throwing your critical thinking skills out the window and just blindly accepting anything the leaderless cult tells you is kind of how it was back then for me as well, so perhaps things haven't really changed all that much.

Why do all these guys have stories about going down the path of bigotry and fascism???

Makes sense with the election that Gamergate would spin up again. Valve really needs to do better when it comes to the far right on Steam.

Glad we don't have conspiracy theories about people plotting to indoctrinate people here on the right-side of history.

Valve doesn't see them as a bug, they see them as a feature.

It has been long enough over the last decade to show that they actively want to let those communities blossom on Steam. Valve doesn't give a shit.

So do they not give a shit or actively want it?

This whole scenario is infuriating. If you don't like a developer, don't buy their games and fucking move on with your lives; it doesn't give you carte blanche to harass those people.

If you're still using Twitter…why the fuck you still using Twitter?

Call me when theres a proper 1:1 replacement with a large active userbase and ill happily swap

There are no alternative social media platforms like Twitter that are not a few thousand members strong echo chambers. Sad but true.

Can't just uproot a bunch of interlocking communities and just place it somewhere else.

The fact that it's happening in the same exact way is the most exhausting part.

What is even happening?

I hate how "woke" has been appropriated to mean something negative. Why are Valve and Discord enabling this and why does the mainstream games media fail to report on these topics?

The important topics of some people complaining about something?

Forget the politics of Gabe and Valve, from an economic standpoint, if you have a group that is only promoting not buying games in your platform designed to sell games you have to question why are you even hosting them. I havent checked but I dont think they recommend people to buy a single game.

  Ban anything critical of what you sell?

Why do these guys all have such binary one-track minds? I don't like this so it should be banned and if you don't ban it you're complete garbage and everyone should stop using you. (Except me obviously, because there's not better alternatives.)

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

I want the government to stop everything I hate! These GAMERGATERS need to be taught a lesson! REMOVE THEM!

Wait.. you want to stop giving children puberty blockers? The government shouldn't listen to others with WRONG opinions!

[benji]

Why do these guys all have such binary one-track minds? I don't like this so it should be banned and if you don't ban it you're complete garbage and everyone should stop using you. (Except me obviously, because there's not better alternatives.)

Why do you have such a binary one-track mind that they either have a binary one-track mind or don't?

[benji]

Benji’s message really needs a variant of “take a carrot, leave a carrot” worked in there somehow.

It is all meaningless online stupidity, our community especially views this mostly as amusing ourselves in free time by taking a joke, leaving a joke even if we may be passionate about certain topics that come up in the process.

[Rendle]

I think you're doing a phenomenal job of threading the needle here BabyDontHurtMe and kudos to you for even trying.

There's a dynamic here that isn't touched on in your post above, though, and that's that mods are sort of "more equal than others" by their very nature. It's not something you can remove from the dynamic (IMO) but is something that needs to be acknowledged in terms of why average users react so strongly to real or imagined misbehavior by mods: the mechanisms to handle bad actors and inappropriate commentary for users are clear and accessible, but the only mechanism to do this with regards to mod is make a giant fucking stink. Often that has the opposite of the hoped for effect, with defensiveness, doubling down, and circling wagons.

Not to pick on plagiarize here, but just reading over the series of events, that's certainly what happened in that case. It's not surprising that some users would start to see the mod team as explicitly antagonistic as they come around to the conclusion that their one avenue of complaint is well and truly closed off to them. It's not realistic to expect the community to "take the L" and just move on...whether or not that's healthiest for the community, it just isn't likely to occur, at least on a short-term time scale.
EDIT: and to complete my point, this dynamic doesn't apply to mods, because they are--literally, in a sense--the bigger person in these cases. If both the community and the mods are snarkin' and snipin', it is the mods that have the higher responsibility to lower the temperature IMO.

[Boredfrom]

Guess who?

https://www.resetera.com/threads/did-and-plurality-in-video-games-reflecting-culture-and-progress-over-time-chonky-op.826698/

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

“Can you talk again like a little girl?”

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

EDIT: and to complete my point, this dynamic doesn't apply to mods, because they are--literally, in a sense--the bigger person in these cases. If both the community and the mods are snarkin' and snipin', it is the mods that have the higher responsibility to lower the temperature IMO.

It was an alright post until the Edit. Not only is this inflammatory, it also is putting Nep in danger. They're literally telling a victim to "be the bigger person"? Don't they understand that Nep was doxxed? This is extremely dehumanizing and victim blaming. EntelechyFuff did not think before posting and views Nep as nothing more than a faceless moderator instead of a fucking person with feelings, hopes, dreams, and right now: fears. Nep spoke with the police twice (an extremely dangerous act as a POC so this is brave on Nep's part might I add) and is STILL being targeted by continued harassment from the PoliEra discord.

I'm sorry but I need to take a breather. This is disgusting.

[Besticus Maximus]

Allowing people to larp as schizos is a new frontier for Bdubs

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

Guess who?

https://www.resetera.com/threads/did-and-plurality-in-video-games-reflecting-culture-and-progress-over-time-chonky-op.826698/

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

“Can you talk again like a little girl?”

[Boredfrom]

Thank you for this informative post, and for sharing your perspective!!!

20 minutes later because the fucker didn’t read the actual post and just assumed wanted to ass pat TwoHearts:

Very interesting read, particularly the historical segment you added.

Bunch of fake motherfuckers.

[Boredfrom]

I experince psychosis myself (delusions and persecutory voices) and am medicated for it and trust me the conflation is utterly frustrating, and only really exists because back in the 50s or 60s it really did used to be called Schizophrenia and old old depitcions of it stuck around in the minds of people who made newer depictions.

Okay, who of you are TwoHearts? That was pretty masterful trolling.

[Besticus Maximus]

Plurality is particularly crazy because the lore they have for it being 'real' is basically stuff they've learned from JRPGs, anime and manga

If a plural genocide where to ever happen, it is a known fact that it will return the highest number of victims of all genocides of all times