[thunderfork]

I was there, it was as Wikipedia describes it. Read the talk page.

Edit: the replies to this comment demonstrate why this problem is intractable: people are very emotionally invested into their idea of how things unfolded, and outright reject other perspectives with little more than a "nuh-uh!".

[bigstrat2003]

I was there as well. It was absolutely not as Wikipedia describes it. If the claim was that some people participating in GG did so because they were sexist, fair enough. That was true and unavoidable because you get crazies in every group. But that was not some kind of universal thing, such that Wikipedia should be describing the movement unambiguously as "misogynistic".

[acdha]

It absolutely matched the Wikipedia summary. There is a ton of evidence linked supporting each point: it was a hate mob from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.

[zahlman]

> from the moment Eron Gjoni decided his ex should be punished for breaking up with him.

There was no such moment in the first place.

[acdha]

It all started with his post, attacking her relationship with Grayson, who never reviewed her games. Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious but that did nothing to stop the attacks – if you look at the threats she received or the online statements the attackers made, they cared a LOT more about her alleged infidelity or what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.

This was later added to his post:

> To be clear, if there was any conflict of interest between Zoe and Nathan regarding coverage of Depression Quest prior to April, I have no evidence to imply that it was sexual in nature.

He even told Boston Magazine that this was the hook he used to get attention, with what he knew was a high likelihood of attacks:

> As Gjoni began to craft “The Zoe Post,” his early drafts read like a “really boring, really depressing legal document,” he says. He didn’t want to merely prove his case; it had to read like a potboiler. So he deliberately punched up the narrative in the voice of a bitter ex-boyfriend, organizing it into seven acts with dramatic titles like “Damage Control” and “The Cum Collage May Not Be Accurate.” He ended sections on cliffhangers, and wove in video-game analogies to grab the attention of Quinn’s industry colleagues. He was keenly aware of attracting an impressionable readership. “If I can target people who are in the mood to read stories about exes and horrible breakups,” he says now, “I will have an audience.”

> One of the keys to how Gjoni justified the cruelty of “The Zoe Post” to its intended audience was his claim that Quinn slept with five men during and after their brief romance. In retrospect, he thinks one of his most amusing ideas was to paste the Five Guys restaurant logo into his screed: “Now I can’t stop mentally referring to her as Burgers and Fries,” he wrote. By the time he released the post into the wild, he figured the odds of Quinn’s being harassed were 80 percent.

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/04/28/gamergate/2/

[zahlman]

> Even he later admitted that the original claims were fictitious

No, he did not. And nobody was claiming that Grayson reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of confusion, and none of the arguments made relied on that being the case.

> what they perceived as unfair privileges for women in the gaming industry than anything about journalism.

This is a false dichotomy. The entire point was that the journalism had a role in creating those privileges.

[acdha]

> No, he did not

Those were his words, I’m not sure why you’d expect your assertion to be more credible.

> nobody was claiming that Grayson reviewed Quinn's games beyond like a day or two of confusion

They spent a year lying about her “unethical” actions justifying all of the abuse, and it all traced back to that foundational lie.

[thunderfork]

How would you characterize the initial blog post?

[FiveOhThree]

Well no, I was also around but not particularly interested at the time. This looks like a classic case of the media trying to close ranks and smear their critics.

[Levitz]

Funny enough, it would the movement stopped being about harassing women the moment the media stopped writing about it, advocates kept on going, criticizing ideological push into videogames to this day. At the same time by now both Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian have been shown to be grifters who really knew jackshit but how to play a crowd.

[zahlman]

I was also there, and I say it was very much not as Wikipedia describes it and the narrative is practically libelous. I would tell you to read as much of the archived back-room nonsense as I did (not just the talk page archives but internal Wikipedia government stuff), but even if could be unearthed this much later nobody deserves the trauma.