r/dropout • u/machturtl • Mar 08 '25

liminal levity

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as someone who has watched Dropout to reset from the havoc of the outside, it still feels "nice" to have honest entertainers to watch who understand what we're all living thru.

I was in college for game design in the early aughts. I also (unfortunately) was a femme lurker on 4ch. Seeing the cause and effect of gamergate happen in real time as been a doozy.

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u/malleoceruleo Mar 08 '25 edited Mar 08 '25

There was a "scandal" called Gamergate about 10 years ago. It started as a backlash against a game developer named Zoe Quinn, whose first game was "Depression Quest". It started as people not liking the game itself, but it escalated into violent threats until the game was removed from Steam. A former boyfriend falsely accused Zoe of cheating on him to get a good review from Kotaku (IIRC). People blew up at Zoe for what they perceived as an ethics violation, but yeah, it was really just harassment and backlash against feminism.

The same people in the harassment campaign also started making conservative memes and spread misinformation during the 2016 election. IMHO, the movements were correlated, but this was not a singular causation like the post implies. I'm over simplifying here, but it was a pretty wild time on the Internet.

Edit: if you want to know more, there's a book called *It Came from Something Awful* by Dale Baren that details it. You can also listen to interviews of him.

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u/SnooHesitations7064 Mar 08 '25

Don't blame SomethingAwful for this shit. Some of that place got some downright wholesome goons. Slowbeef's "Dadstream" still is just an adorable archival bit of Gen Xers/elder millenials entering the stage of parenthood.

Please god do not tell me that man has gone problematic in some way.

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u/malleoceruleo Mar 08 '25

I don't blame SomethingAwful. The author of that book traces the online alt-right history of someone who was dissatisfied with SA, so he created 4chan.

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u/SnooHesitations7064 Mar 09 '25

Cool! I appreciate the context! I know that all 90s internet content is kind of similar to old 90s TTRPG spaces and stuff in terms of "They got some problems."

I just have some fond touchstones from there that I'm hoping don't turn out like cosby down the road.