I don’t understand how GG can view this as a victory beyond the surface level. I think the large majority of us will be taking a stand and not using Gaf anymore which says that we don’t just pay lip service to our views. We don’t tolerate this stuff.
Also all the arguments that Tyler used are typical GG arguments to support their behavior towards their targets. They should be eating up his defense. They’ll probably adopt him to their cause.
I saw a GG supporter on IGN Boards happy about Neogaf going away and raving about Trump in the same comment,it’s frustrating.
Just a note that Reset Era does not have GAF mods on board: https://twitter.com/rollingpirahna/status/922574952301076480
Its ZhugeEX, nibel, SweetNicole and shinobi602 who will be the forums administrators. It seems a good portion of the community and previous forum staff (though none of them have anything to do with the sites launch) seem to be backing it. They claim to be taking a fairer and more transparent role to the forums moderation hopefully building something positive and inclusive. Its expected to launch later on tonight.
I’d like to see Bish involved with something like ResetEra. I miss him going through threads with a lawn mower.
Who is responsible for the site then?
GG will use it as a victory because the substance of an issue doesn’t matter - the owner of one of the most prominent adversarial sites going down for sexual harassment /assault? Use it, repeat it and turn it in to whatever truth you can. The real issue about how someone in a position of power and authority abused the trust and friendship of someone they knew doesn’t matter - because now people can point to Neogaf and say “see, there just as bad and guilty of what you accuse us of, maybe they’re even worse!”
Thanks for posting this. It seemed a bit fishy this got off the ground so fast.
Even if she didn’t have a boyfriend, even if she wasn’t in an open relationship with only women, this wouldn’t be okay. Having sex with your harasser happens. She even said that she gave people second chances, chalked it up to just weird/drunk behavior. This is pretty normal to me as a sexual assault/rape survivor. We spin these narratives that there’s only one way to be the best victim, to be so untouchable, because we require victims to be “good” to prove that it is rape versus believing that it was assault or rape or harassment.
To the people saying that he could have “handled this better” and stated that this was a mistake - he turned shitty, which is actual proof that it wasn’t, that this wasn’t “an accident” to me. Hit dogs howl. The idea that this could have been fixed should start and end with “he shouldn’t have gotten into the shower because he knew what he was doing and violated his friend.” There’s rehabilitation for your actions but you have to actually admit guilt and people implying here that he could have minimized this “controversy” by admitting not-guilt is weird as hell to me.
It’s just like how GG claimed victory when Hulk Hogan took down Gawker.
If anyone is somehow unsure whether or not ResetEra will have a rocky start, just check out the hashtag on twitter. Hoo boy.
You put it better than I did or could. Although I feel that some issues have sides that need to be taken, maybe this is a wake up call that taking a side isn’t enough if you don’t put the sentiment in to action?
Its going to be rough. I’m very fed up with this spiteful side of the internet.
So very much this. He could have chosen not to get into the shower in the first place.That’s where the entire problem lies with his account of events. After that he has to own all of his actions and bear full responsibility, there’s no ifs or buts in that regard, he didn’t get her consent prior to doing so, he assumed he had it, he assumed very very wrongly.
He could have held his hands up and unreservedly apologised and accepted what he did was wrong on all counts.
He did not. That places him firmly beyond the pale in my book, I would hope in many of your books as well.
If you need to consider this for a moment, I want you to picture yourself in the shower and then someone walking in on you and grabbing you somewhere intimate when you’ve just finished throwing up, and I want you to picture that person being someone like Weinstein, someone who has power over people. Now wonder if you’d speak up right away?
You just know there’s going to be a rush to register sleeper cell burner accounts at ResetEra.
It looks like they’re doing invites initially, but it will be rough, for sure. If Evilore attempts to reopen GAF tonight it may take some heat off.
NeoGAF’s already back to 502 errors, so I dunno how much luck he’s gonna have there.
I imagine there are a lot of burner accounts too, if he doesn’t have a moderation team setup it’ll be rocky.
I suppose I shouldn’t expect logic when it comes to matters such as this.
I don’t know how to respond to all this. I’m here because Gaf is down and I needed a place, some place to read strangers talk about videogames.
Ok first of all, amazing job Patrick on this article. Second, I want to give some words to the victim, but I don’t know what to say, I never do.
This whole thing dawned on me kind of abruptly. My history with gaf is weird, I found it a long way back, probably around 2012/13. At the time I registered but my account was never activated, I waited more than a year, lurking everyday. I eagerly wanted to participate in the discussions, I felt like this was the perfect community for me, with crazy posters, but fairly interesting discussions and best of all a zero tolerance policy against hatred and bigotry. Quite funny looking back.
After a year I finally decided “fuck it”, I’m making another account, this got accepted in weeks. And so began my tale of posting on gaf… little more than 200 post total. After the initial glee I didn’t feel like writing much and I actually didn’t understand at the time.
But in the last year i started piecing it. The community, specially on the gaming side, wasn’t hateful, but wasn’t all that open either. Threads about lgbt characters in videogames or how those in the community felt with its portrayals always brought a bad taste. People weren’t disrespectful, but fairly dismissive of concerns raised. It felt like a deeper discussion couldn’t be had about certain topics because there were limits that the community wasn’t interested in engaging with. I can point to a kind of recent thread that talked about the queer routes in Mass Effect Andromeda and how they were fairly lacking. There was a big sentiment of “we’re lucky Bioware existed and was giving some scrapes” (and maybe we are lucky, but we also can talk about how it feels like it’s not enough).
Funny enough it was the big master that completely soured the community for me. A few months back Anita posted a video talking about how “gay” is used as an insult against homophobes quite often and how it still propagates the notion that being gay is something bad. I actually don’t have strong feelings about the subject ( I guess it doesn’t bother me most days), but Evilore closed the thread, according to him “her argument was ridiculous”. And so, a completely inoffensive thread was shut down because the owner didn’t agree with the idea. It reminded me that gaf didn’t actually belong to the community.
After that I stopped visiting the forum as often, which actually made me improve my productivity.
This big long winded post was more for me than for this community and I hope that’s ok, I have no idea if it has any value, it probably doesn’t. But I had to write somewhere, tell someone, because this big part of my digital life just disappeared and even though I already had ended that relationship this feels like a true goodbye.
Gaf helped me through some rough times when getting out of bed to just live the day was incredibly hard. Even if the forum recovers I’m not coming back. I just wanted to say thanks to that community somehow.
I also wanted to apologize, because this feels very off-topic, and I hope it doesn’t get me banned , I’d love for waypoint to become my new home, even for just some creepy lurking.
To end this, I just wanted to express my sympathy to Leupp and every other victim out there, talk to someone, ask for help, please be safe.
