Real Talk: What can we be doing better here?

Here's my perspective.

At the beginning, Ghazi was all about "you are not alone". GamerGate was this loud, omnipresent monstrosity, and the people who just wanted to say "this thing happening over here isn't a good thing" got a place to find that there were a lot of people who felt the same way.

This is reasonably close to being the same mission statement as SRS.

In the intervening months, GamerGate was shown to be a largely toothless fringe movement of the same rogues gallery of Internet assholes that show up everywhere else. While it was and remains very good at targeting individuals, the rest of society rose up and gave its victims a podium from which to talk to a sympathetic public.

Which left Ghazi in this weird space where it's running the risk of punching down.

The ringleaders, your Milos, Juice Bros and Biscuits, are still there puffing out their chests and begging to be toppled off their pedestals, but while—as a group—the people who surround them are part of a larger problem, pointing at most of the individual participants starts to feel like bullying.

Meanwhile this sub found itself a little too tied up in its own triumphalism to notice. The tone of Ghazi became "Thank God that We Are Right", without the self-effacing irony that needs to accompany such a statement, and in many ways the personal identity of being opposed to GamerGate has become the same kind of unquestionable talisman for some participants as the invented Gamer identity has become for the people they are arguing against.

I'm not sure what the answer is. As Randi said on Twitter, having a safe space to vent about the crap still emanating from Gamergate is important. But it's just as important to keep in mind our own mantra that there is no such thing as anti-gamergate. There is no "side" here, there is no "position" to "defend", there is just a general allergy to bullshit.

/r/GamerGhazi Thread