alt Hacker NewsTo me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.
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Gamergate was definitely an inflection point, though my opinion on it has changed throughout the years. I think it was the first internet squabble where throwing around accusations of "isms" became a common tactic. And in defense of what? "Gaming journalism" is as bad as it's ever been. There's a real "access media" problem in the industry as well as a laser focus on social issues at the expense of almost everything else. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of hype (wo)men for large games publishers. I wish we could get the kind of cutting, acerbic game criticism that Pitchfork delivered for music in the early 2000s - the medium would be better for it.
The leaked Epstein files have revealed that the GamerGate "outrage" was largely astroturfed[1]. It was one of the first large-scale experiments run and observed by people like Steve Bannon, Jeffery Epstein and Peter Thiel on how "flood the zone" with outrage and contradictory information, allowing people to be manipulated for political gain.
You were never on 4chan before that I guess?
I think this is more about us all being on platforms that value engagement and simply don't care if that "engagement" is people fighting with each other. The Internet always had whackjobs... in fact on a per capita basis I'd bet that in the early days we're praising as "we all got along" the whackjob ratio was higher than it is today and it has since regressed to the norm... but the systems structurally tended to discourage the nastiness. There was still plenty of it, but on Usenet, you could add the guy who enraged you to the point of blinding rage to your ignore file... and you could add the two guys who refuse to ignore each other to your own ignore file. In the Weblog space you could just, you know, not read that other blog that infuriates you. On custom forums the community was small and tended to evict people.
It was not paradise. But it was more workable, when the platforms weren't designed by PhDs to seek out and exploit your outrage for their ad clicks.