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by vezzy-fnord 4307 days ago
The recent GamerGate demonstrations do touch on all of these, actually. But it's not a centralized or particularly focused effort, at the end of the day. It's really the messy culmination of all the outrage over corruption in gaming journalism that people kept their mouths shut over, and all of it finally exploding. Multiple subcultures intersect in the whole ordeal.

Actually, the Quinn scandal was instrumental in people opening their eyes about one thing. Namely, that it's not only large corporate media behind this. Even independent media isn't safe or trustworthy, and both is corrupted, but in different ways. Independent media is more likely to foster nepotism, cronyism and lying by omission/censorship, whereas the big shots, having major access to publishers and trade shows, can obviously go further.

It has also caused a lot of people to re-analyze these people's intentions and revisit previous incidents, which in light of new information, no longer seem as clear cut. Just because one is an underdog (and that's quite relatively speaking, anyway) does not make them righteous.

Actually, many people already knew that there's lots of corruption going on at major writers. This is why so many gamers went to indie media, but then they realized that nothing is safe. The outrage is that ultimately, all of it is the same: passive clickbait supposed to milk attention. But now there's nepotism, too. It's the outrage from now knowing that there's no one who represents your side in the media, and that people who are only interested in gaming from a surface level are holding major positions.

Finally at the risk of setting a fire, it wasn't a simple matter of a "blogger's personal sex life". The implications were wider reaching into the aforementioned nepotism.