this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
495 points (99.4% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
41699 readers
3489 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah. I agree. I time it to 2014 and can see Gamergate, now in retrospect, as a clear part of the origin story of the current moment. And one of the clearest signals is how befuddling and practically impossible it is to actually understand what gamergate is/ was. I was there for it, in the sense that I saw it happened, but it was noise at the periphery of my vision. And even what I did right there, the swapping of a subject word to an action word; how language around this "gamergate" thing evolved, and how it became completely befuddling to those not already interior to this thing to understand.
And I still dont understand it. And I don't think others, even those deeply involved understand it either. But I want to be clear when I say "understand", I've done a fair bit of research. I've pulled every reddit forum post on the matter. I've read book chapters and deep articles. But with the Epstein files and Bannons involvement, which we only now understand: it sure was "something".
MY current working hypothesis; I think gamergate was the test run for Brexxit. And the test run for MAGA/J6. I think there is potentially also a Hungary and Orban, which preceded gamer gate.
It was confirmed in Fire and Fury by Wolff that GamerGate was indeed Steve Bannon's POC of MAGA.
His news outlet Breitbart and working partner Milo Yannopolis were the main instigators of it.
I appreciate you mentioning this. Something I've been looking for is a signal in the data which can show how this happened, lets say.. from the other side of the mirror.
I don't know if it was a test run or if it showed the ability to weaponize Extremely Online folks.
I remember gamergate as something that, on the surface, looked like possibly legitimate criticism, but then as you said, people that went into it became kind of odd, with their own language used to describe it which didn't really make sense. Like, the words were there, but they were using kinda tortured definitions in a way that weaponized them (...into a misogynistic culture war).
Personally, I've always been fascinated with language as someone who basically grew up bilingual, and picked up a few along the way since. There are concepts that I simply am unable to discuss in certain languages, because the words are not there.
Weaponized language had been around for some time. Hell, Gingrich basically made his career by using specific loaded phrases in speeches given to an empty senate chamber, specifically for the weirdos who watch C-SPAN. Similarly, you had some insular (often hate) groups that had their own internal lingo. Gamergate seems to have combined the two in a way that is now becoming increasingly common in politics.
Like I said, I've gone as far as pulling the entire archive of reddit from this time. My original intent was to try and look for correlations between things in the threads and the epstein files. Dug a bit in then life well. #projects
I've still got the data on my stacks. Perhaps another month.