Before this thought completely leaves my mind:

Been watching some youtubes surrounding the old controversies about gamergate, anita sarkesian and zoey quinn.

I don't remember ever having much of an opinion on the topic aside from desiring more transparency from people claiming to be journalists and public speakers. So here we are 3 years later and watching these old videos just dredges up memories of how hysterical everything got.

Jim Sterling mentioned some interesting things in his video on the subject but one of them really stuck out, the idea that fence sitters in the debate are getting tarred with the same brush. Are we? Especially those of us who browse 4chan? I'm anonymous, noone has any idea who I am. How am I being personally affected by anything said on there or about it? I'm not. The views people are taking in the wider public from '4channers' is not representative of anybody really.

I'm not plugging my ears Jim. Never did. I just found your sweeping generalisations to be as credulous as the others' in their smear campaigns. Everybody involved is wrong. Fence sitting is a failure of either side of the debate to engage and convince the fence sitters to join their cause.

People posting horrible tweets on industry pundits is not to be taken as the literal view of everyone involved or of everyone from that same source, no matter who they are or where they claim to be from. But you knew this already didn't you? As a public speaker that's irresponsible. With later videos Jim has said that his views became more moderate and tolerant and I fully believe that to be true but did he ever take back some of the misinformed shit he said during the height of the debate? I guess I'll never know. The professional thing to do is not to make these ridiculous videos in the first place. Totalbiscuit braved the lions den to talk to 4chan people about it and walked away probably slightly less ambivalent about 4chan than he was before. If only more people would directly engage that community they would have seen all the threads posted non-stop calling to action for members of 4chan to NOT shitpost on other websites, peoples blogs and tweets and generally do not engage in any interaction with media socialites at all. If that had been catalogued would opinions of a website that I've been visiting since 2007 be different? I know 4chan culture better than a lot of people. It's a culture of mostly icy indifference. Anons are realists: the world is a terrible place, anon is an easy scapegoat and games journalists are mostly corrupt.  

Noone at 4chan ever gave a shit about zoey quinn the human being, they cared about her manipulating facts and opinions through biased outlets in order to promote her career. Same as Anita Saarkesian who has been given a massive boost to her public speaking career through using this abuse she suffered (from whom I wonder, certainly not us, we didn't care enough) in order to profit.

And what about everyone else? Can I tar you with the same brush Jim? Was being topical a temporary boost for you too? Getting on board with the hype and controversy and making a 5 minute video during the zenith of the public spotlight did that benefit you? Like it did for kotaku and IGN and all those others?

I don't feel sorry for zoey quinn and I certainly won't defend her from abuse and harassment because I don't give a fuck about her. I'm not fence sitting, I'm staying staunchly neutral until some real facts are presented that we can then talk about. Shame for her though it seems the only facts we've had to discuss is how she slept with a bunch of guys and then had psychologically unstable idiots threaten her.

And that's what this all stems from isn't it. Idiots desiring their 15 minutes of fame by escalating every discussion and degrading it to the most base level as quickly as they can to keep the fire burning. These idiots exist on both sides of the debate. Instead of pragmatism we see constant emotional outbursts.

What about today? Today on 4chan Anita's theories have little weight, her credibility is in tatters after revelations that most of her source material is fabricated and any desire for debate to see her relevance restored is muted due to the ease with which people can debunk her arguments. Yes tropes against women had a valid angle but the execution was poor and the woman leading it all inadequate for the task. $10,000 to speak wasn't too shabby though.