BBE/IE cracked.com

[Travis Retriever]

http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/a-90-second-guide-to-determine-if-your-internet-cause-bs/
For trying to paint GamerGate as a conspiracy theory.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-i-learned-as-internets-most-hated-person/
And for giving Zoe Quinn a platform to write her bullshit.

Needless to say I removed them from my bookmarks for this.

[MrBogosity]

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-i-learned-as-internets-most-hated-person/
And for giving Zoe Quinn a platform to write her bullshit.

And she doesn't even MENTION what she did to the Fine Young Capitalists. Hey, Zoe, maybe there's a REASON why people hate you so much!

[AnCap Dave]

The Corruption in Video Game Journalism page wrote a response to Quinn's piece on Cracked.

It was also posted on Pastebin for those who can't read it on Facebook.

This is a response to Zoe Quinn's Cracked article "5 Things I Learned as the Internet's Most Hated Person".

It is intended to be read alongside it, but can be read separately.



You can find the article here:

PAGE 1 --- https://archive.today/EQ1Al ---

PAGE 2 --- https://archive.today/OhQgT ---



This was written by a /v/anguard. My first board was /a/. I have had some time on /m/ and /vg/.I have no knowledge of other board cultures, but since /v/ is the lead here, that's not relevant.



This response can also be found in a pastebin --- http://pastebin.com/qJXFQePp ---





TITLE: "5 Things I Learned as the Internet's Most Hated Person"



It would be very difficult to determine who is THE most hated person on the internet. I can think of quite a few people who are more hated, especially by Zoe Quinn's own admission she was literally nobody a month ago.



Is Zoe Quinn really more hated than, say, Obama? A lot of people hate Obama. Is Zoe Quinn more hated than Obama?



But then again this is written in the "Top Not-10 Things You Really Need To Know Right This Second" format so perhaps it should just be accepted as clickbait overexaggeration. Cracked has been declining in recent years anyways so it's not hard to believe.



OPENING



Cracked Editors,



The suspicions and evidence point towards a vast network of corruption, collusion, and conflict of interest. You are saying that even if these things were true, "this is still the most pointless fucking bullshit anyone has ever forced us to read".



I sincerely hope it isn't because to anyone who knows how to read and takes corruption serious even in the slightest way, this is simply a statement of admission that you really don't read much at all before writing your articles. Which again isn't too hard to believe at this point.



If instead you have things to say on the philosophical side of things in the line of "theres always corruption" and "you shouldn't fight conflict of interest" or "this is how the way the world works", I'm sure we'd love to hear it. Archon, cofounder of the Escapist, might be interested too. He's pretty well-versed in these sorts of things. If it's good he might even write a response to it.



= = =



There's some other stuff here, the only thing that needs to be responded to is the idea that this didn't blow over because "[Zoe Quinn] works in an industry that has very strong feelings about women". The only strong feelings anyone has about women in videogames is a hard dick for big titties.



i.e. not relevant to anything in this article or anything said by Zoe Quinn.



#5: "This Can Happen To Anybody (but It Helps if You're Female)"



/v/  (the main board involved in this) is one of the largest boards on 4chan and it has difficulties setting up mario kart and DOA5 lobbies. Most projects of any kind, from independent games to music videos, are usually run by one person and fizzle out because nobody cares enough to put themselves out there, much less for an extended period of time. Most anons have never heard of the things she's talking about. I only have a passing knowledge of the Father's Day thing because /pol/ came in and talked about their tactics once (which /v/ strongly declined), and haven't heard of the other two at all. If you go to /pol/ though it seems like they always have a bunch of small projects running. Most people don't know about them. What they do know is "keep /pol/ in /pol/" and "back to /pol/ with you".



The largest project ever completed was Katawa Shoujo, and the largest movement ever backed was Chanology. There have been no organized actions anywhere near comparable to either of these since the days of the Habbo Hotel raids.



In light of all this, GamerGate is a fairly unique event. Today is September 16 - one month after TheZoe QuinnPost was put up on August 16. Even if this was all about Zoe Quinn, this can't happen to just anyone. It takes a *lot* to unite the boards of 4chan (except /co/, r.i.p.) with reddit and tumblr. You have to be really fucking fucked up. The most commonly accepted explanation is that this happened due to the Streissand Effect - namely, Zoe Quinn got a network of people in power in various places to shut down discussion about this. Literally no one cares about literally who's sex life and her ex complaining. But people were told to shut up about it, often for obviously bullshit reasons. So people dug deeper.



Most people will say that this has never been about Zoe Quinn. Whether or not people got into this because they cared about Zoe Quinn is difficult to tell, but it's certain that the focus on her was lifted a long time ago. The most objective measure I have is the title of the active thread on /v/ on this topic.



I became aware of GamerGate on August 24th (before it was called GamerGate), and have archived every thread that I've been on since then. "General" threads, i.e. not a one-time thread on a one-time topic, on 4chan almost always have the a consistent running title to help people find them better.



According to my archives, the standard naming of threads stopped being "QUINNSPIRACY" on August 29 10~11AM Pacific Time. This changed around 11AM~12PM that same day to "#GAMERGATE". I don't care to look back that far on twitter, but that is probably the day Adam Baldwin created the said hashtag on twitter.



Of the 307 other threads I have archived since then, there are a total of 4 threads with "QUINNSPIRACY" in the title. I am not awake or on /v/ all the time, but most of the events occur during American daytime and I am on most of the time during and after it.



4/307 is 1.3%.



As for the "hates females/feminists" angle, a prominent feminist has jumped on board recently. Christina Hoff Sommers (just released a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MxqSwzFy5w) is universally loved by the anons in the GamerGate threads. Just like Zoe Quinn, she has a nickname:



"Mom".



There's also that whole TFYC thing that /v/ gave more than 20,000USD to, and Vivian James. No huge breasts. No revealing clothing. Just an ordinary girl who wants to play videogames. There's a post going around showing how this choice came about was because it'd make for a great way to troll everyone, and perhaps that's how it got its initial support. You look at it now though, and you try to attack Vivian James, /v/ won't respond to such as a counterattack to a troll. No one thinks "hehe I got him now lets see how I can make them more mad".



/v/ responds to an attack on Vivian James as a father responds to an attack on his daughter.



Those who do hate women would never have been able to get this many people on board. It's something else. Something bigger.



#4. "Internet Personalities Start Jumping on the Bandwagon"



There was another article released recently by Cracked, "A 90-Second Guide to Determine if Your Internet Cause Is BS". Its first question is "Does Your Cause Require an Elaborate Conspiracy Theory to Be True?". Please keep this in mind when reading Zoe Quinn's story.



It's interesting that while the title and opening of this section is about "Internet Personalities", which at least as I understand it would mean big popular people like TotalBiscuit and PewDiePie or something like that, Zoe Quinn talks about one InternetAristocrat video who can hardly be called an Internet Personality (current total of 31 videos, ranging from 17k~208k views each NOT including "QUINNSPIRACY" videos), and then proceeds to show a few random posts by actual literal nobodies, all while piling purely decorative words and phrases like "live for this shit", "milk the story", "bullshit you'd expect", "became obsessed", "all I could do", etc.



Zoe Quinn doesn't talk about what actual internet personalities had to say. TotalBiscuit didn't say Zoe Quinn once in his recent videos on the topic. JonTron had an opinion relating to all of this on the Co-Optional Podcast (47) but talked about Anita Sarkeesian. Adam Baldwin doesn't care about Zoe Quinn. Christina Hoff Sommers doesn't care about Zoe Quinn. Milo Yiannopoulos doesn't care about Zoe Quinn. Daniel Vavra doesn't care about Zoe Quinn.



Or perhaps they do. I would've expected Zoe Quinn to enlighten me on how exactly those Internet Personalities are jumping on a bandwagon against her, but Zoe Quinn doesn't do that here in the slightest.



#3: "Then It Spills Over Into Real Life"



The logic here, based on the progression of the article, is probably along the lines of "because all these internet trolls and opportunistic internet personalities are railing against me, all these things happened to me and people I love in real life". Note first and foremost that since the premises have been removed - i.e. it has not been shown that Zoe Quinn is the most hated person on the internet, that 4chan is actively against her (her nickname there is "Literally Who"), or that internet personalities are organizing and siccing their fanbases against her.



i.e. the things Zoe Quinn describes are happening to her are due to the people who've always been crazies and assholes. Every group has these, and it's unfortunate that they happen, but we do our best against it. On 4chan's /v/ - the Cathedral of Misogyny - any call for harassing, raiding, or doxxing is immediately shouted down or deleted shortly by a mod. "Pandaman" Lo-Ping on the Twitter front has said GamerGate supporters are among the first to fight back and report any harassment coming from our side.



Zoe Quinn brings up female developers again, so I'll bring up Christina Sommers again: there is no "misogyny". If we find you are pro-gamergate and are helpful to our objectives, we welcome and support you to the extent that you welcome and support us. Doesn't matter if you're male female tranny furry whatever. Same if you're anti-gamergate.



We call Zoe Quinn "Literally Who", but there's a bunch of males we actually hate and give much harsher nicknames to. That's because, unlike a HTML game nobody has heard of from a woman who nobody has heard of, those guys actually have power and have made important corrupt moves.



4chan is perhaps the most equal place on earth. Every post is judged only by the merits of its text and image, anonymous and singular, with no connections to any past posting history. This is the sort of culture we bring to GamerGate. We could care less about how many dragon dildos you have. Did you shitpost? You're out. Did you contribute? Keep up the good work.



#2: "And Suddenly, It's National News"



This is another misleading section title with even more misleading text. It appears that Zoe Quinn is trying to say that places like MSNBC and FOX started talking about it, but that's not here (and didn't happen). Zoe Quinn actually talks about stuff being a "confusing mess" and "can't all be about just petty slut-shaming", and then that "it's not that strange if you're familiar with certain corners of gaming culture" - i.e. that "petty slut-shaming" IS what this is all about, and that's the conclusion that National News came to.



The title image of this section contains three major newspapers: theguardian, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. theguardian and The New Yorker are both interview pieces with Zoe Quinn, so obviously they'd come to the same conclusion Zoe Quinn did. The Washington Post did not focus on slut-shaming at all, hell its title is about "industry growing pains".



But again Zoe Quinn doesn't talk about that. She instead puts up quotes from... somewhere... from someone... talking about something? A lot of people a lot of places talk about a lot of things. Zoe Quinn gives us no reason to pay attention to these particular things over any other thing and doesn't point to anything in particular.



Supposing those newspapers are equivalent of National News, Zoe Quinn's side of the story has gotten to national news (she never did specify what "IT" was). Gamergate's side and objectives have yet to be presented. So perhaps it will appear a different way once that arrives.



#1: "Then, Finally, It Passes (Until Next Time)"



This section talks about Zoe Quinn moving on with her life. It is unfortunate that she received whatever harassment she did, and I think GamerGate at large supports Zoe Quinn getting over all the trolling she's received. There's certainly some contingent of us that are adolescently out trolling people, and being the initial focus that she was it'd be much easier to wean them off if she stopped responding to them, at least for a little while. That's the first thing that's taught after all: don't feed the trolls.



We have bigger things to worry about than Literally Who, that's why she's called Literally Who. It isn't a campaign against women, or against feminism. Random individuals who support this or don't really don't matter. What matters are actions for and against what we all want.



It's against corruption, in all its forms, with all its glory, and all its horror.



The fire rises.



EDITOR'S NOTE:



Zoe Quinn didn't deserve death threats. Absolutely not. Your recommendation is also very helpful to us; I think a lot of us have been in front of the screens too long digging and spreading info on social media and haven't appreciated Mother Nature in a while. There's that one Buddha quote, "Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die" - there's definitely many of us that forget that, perhaps especially those of us who don't harass and don't condone it.



You deserve to be boycotted though.



Thank you for putting out this article.



It's the last one I'll read without putting it through the filter.



--- --- ---



Thank you for reading.

[AnCap Dave]

Hey Cracked, this is no conspiracy theory.

[Travis Retriever]

Hey Cracked, this is no conspiracy theory.

Reblogged/RT on Tumblr & Twiter with hashtags for whatever that's worth.

https://twitter.com/AdamBaldwin/status/512370413251211264
Dat Damage control.