Almost No One Sided with #GamerGate: A Research Paper on the Internet’s Reaction to Last Year’s Mob

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Abstract

Lately I’ve been troubled by the fact that GamerGate’s supporters and I seem to have completely opposite perceptions about what most people think of their movement. I’ve had GamerGaters tell me that most people don’t equate GamerGate with online harassment and that most people (or at least, most gamers) are actually on GamerGate’s side. How is it that our perceptions of “what most people think” are so different? Could it be that we all live inside some social-media echo chamber that makes us oblivious to other points of view?

So I decided to start a little research project to settle the question: What did most people think about GamerGate?

The results of this project suggest that the vast majority of people do in fact equate GamerGate with online harassment, sexism, and/or misogyny. More people see GamerGate as a toxic mob rather than a legitimate movement worthy of respect.

The following paper goes into great detail about how I conducted this research and why I reached those conclusions. This paper also reads like a historical analysis of the previous year by uncovering patterns in the ways that different people reacted to GamerGate.

There’s a strong TRIGGER WARNING for anyone who was deeply affected by last year’s events and similar forms of harassment. Things get particularly heavy in the section titled Patterns in How People Reacted to GamerGate.

Table of Contents

  1. Abstract
  2. Methodology
  3. The Data
    1. Link to the Full Data Set
  4. Observations & Analysis
    1. A Look at the Pro-GamerGate Sources
    2. Comparing Estimates of Population Size
    3. Patterns in How Publications Started Covering GamerGate
      1. Intel and its Advertisements
      2. What Exactly is All of this GamerGate Stuff?
      3. Harassment and Death Threats
    4. Patterns in How People Reacted to GamerGate
      1. Revulsion
      2. Fear and Terror
      3. Sadness, Anger, and Outrage
      4. Analyzing and Fighting GamerGate
      5. Mockery
    5. Why Does GamerGate Think Everyone Likes Them?
    6. Patterns in How People Remember GamerGate
  5. Conclusion, and GamerGate’s Legacy

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Stop Acting So Surprised: How Microaggressions Enforce Stereotypes in Tech

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I recently wrote a new article that was published today on Model View Culture. This was my first exposure to the world of professional writing, which means that I had to pitch my piece to them, have multiple drafts reviewed by their editor, and get paid for my work.

Read the Full Article on Model View Culture

Over the past eight months or so, I’ve become a huge fan of this publication, and I’m super honored to have my work published by them. I love how their essays look at the tech industry from an angle that you don’t really see on typical industry publications. They often discuss the industry’s culture and social problems while promoting interesting and diverse voices, opinions, and projects.

They are an independent publication with zero ad revenue, which means they only make money when you buy things from them. In particular, I love their printed quarterly subscriptions, which are also available digitally. There’s something really fun about getting a little journal in the mail that’s filled with super fascinating thoughts from awesome people who are actively working to improve the tech industry. After reading my piece, feel free to look around their site, follow them on social media, and if you end up liking them as much as I do, please consider supporting their work.

How I’m Coping with Post-GamerGate Depression

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I’m still having trouble dealing with what happened to the games community during the second half of 2014. A lot of really depressing stuff happened, and so it’s not surprising that that sense of depression still lingers.

Unfortunately, #GamerGate still isn’t over. When I say “post-GamerGate,” what I really mean is “post-(that-time-when-everyone-was-talking-about)-GamerGate.” The hate mob is still obsessively fixating on and continuously harassing the same four or so women, and they’re still coming up with new targets to attack every week.

I was surprised by how much I was emotionally affected by the whole GamerGate mess. I usually don’t get worked up over many things, since I generally try to be laid back and optimistic, and I also try very hard to stay mentally grounded, since I know that politically and emotionally charged events such as this one have a tendency to mess up one’s sense of perspective. And so I was genuinely surprised when I realized how cynical and depressed I had grown over this whole thing.

And frankly, I’m tired of being depressed about this, so I’m hoping that writing this post might help me to get some of it out of my system, or at least reach a greater sense of emotional clarity on this.

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How to Get Better at Teaching Yourself New Skills

To be honest, I always cringe a little when I hear someone say that they “taught themselves” how to do something. While the phrase has become a shorthand for saying “I learned this outside of the traditional classroom setting,” I can’t but help be bothered by the sense of arrogance that comes with the fact that it also seems like a shorthand for “I learned this without a teacher.”

There is always a teacher involved. Whether you learned that skill by reading books, following online tutorials, watching instructional videos, or reading articles online, someone had to create that content for you to consume.

One of the most amazing things about working in tech is that people tend to spend a lot of time either learning from others or helping others understand complicated skills. Anyone can become a “teacher” just by writing a single article or by giving a talk at a conference, and this promotes a really cool continuous-learning culture within the community.

But it worries me just how little attention we sometimes give to the teachers who create the content that we have become so dependent on for our professional development. Software engineers tend to take the availability and quality of this educational content for granted. Many people in this field describe themselves as “self-taught” rather than attributing their expertise to the individuals who they learned from.

This is a problem, not necessarily because it’s rude or self-centered behavior, but because we’re creating misleading expectations among students and upcoming engineers. We often trivialize how easy it is to learn new technologies by saying “oh yeah just do a Google search!” We act as if just any Google result is good enough to learn from, as if the quality of the educational content has no effect on one’s ability to master the material. We give off the impression that mastery is entirely dependent on our own intelligence, and so when students struggle, rather than questioning the quality of the content that they’re trying to learn from, they instead question their own intelligence and start contemplating whether they should just give up.

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11 Unconventional Tips for Improving your Programming Skills

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There are plenty of good resources out there that teach the technical skills that are necessary for becoming a good programmer, but I’ve seen only a few that give you the more personal lessons that you often only learn through experience or trial and error. In this article, I’m going to share with you some of my own habits and skills that I’ve gained over the years to help me do better work.

This article is based on a post I made over a year ago on the UA CS Facebook Group in response to someone’s question about how you can become a faster programmer. Instead of posting about tools and keyboard shortcuts, most of my tips are about how to get yourself to think faster, along with a few tips for avoiding time-consuming mistakes.

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Magnet Ball Mega-Postmortem: How Learning on-the-fly Saved an Ambitious Student Project

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The following is my honors thesis, which is a research paper that I had to write in order to graduate with Honors from the University of Arizona. I had published the first two parts of this paper on my previous blog, but I have never published the full work until now. While I did try to adapt the tone of the paper to be more fitting for online reading, the paper is mostly unmodified, aside from a few major additions made to part four.

I’m going to warn you now; this paper is LONG. One of the goals when I was writing this was to show enough detail so that students who wish to try running a project like this could learn from our process and our mistakes. This project was a ton of fun, and I hope you’ll have fun reading about it.

Table of Contents

  1. Intro
    1. Abstract
    2. The Team
    3. Introduction
  2. PART ONE: Recruiting and Managing People
    1. Starting the Project
    2. Designing the Team Experience
    3. The Recruitment Process
    4. Unfortunately, Our Team was Too Big
    5. Availability and Communication Problems
  3. PART TWO: The Senses Project
    1. A Broken Pre-Production Phase
    2. The First Prototype
    3. The Second Prototype
    4. Turning the Project Around
  4. PART THREE: Pre-Production Done Right
    1. Fixing our Creative Process
    2. Rapid Prototyping and the Creative Process
    3. The Fruits of Pre-Production
    4. Prototype 1: Fighting Blind
    5. Prototype 2: Detonator
    6. Prototype 3: Particle Racer
    7. Prototype 4: Runner
    8. Prototype 5: Magnet Man
    9. Prototype 5, v2: Magnet Ball
  5. PART FOUR: Prototyping until the Bitter End
    1. Our Creative Process during Production
    2. Our Development Process during Production
    3. Thoughts on the Prototype-Centered Process
    4. Things I Would Do Differently
    5. In Conclusion

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