I will always feel shame at how much I bought into trump-era games journalists as just, moral people. look at anyone in Cecilia D'Anastasio's orbit and you can see how much of that was nothing but a branding exercise. and this whole extended universe of Kotaku, Polygon and Waypoint softboy stuff that was only ever a more readily consumable version of those safety pin people after the 2016 elections. "we're the good ones, we care, we're making a stand"

Waypoint discord mods set up bots that would gently admonish you in DMs if you used ableist language. then the mods would delete conversations about how fucked up it was for Austin Walker to praise Steven Totilo on main after saying he "believed Nathalie" with his entire chest. And how much everyone in Kotaku's orbit would spew bullshit about why they could not simply delete a news article that materially made Nathalie's life miserable for months. And how Gita, as much legitimate trauma they endured as a Kotaku employee, Gita was subtweeting Nathalie for being too annoying about a piece of journalistic malpractice that caused her legitimate pain

And in the end, after all the good and morally correct Kotaku journalists left the site for wherever else, it was a new hire under the evil, mean private equity draculas who did the decent thing and just deleted a fucking news story so Nathalie could have closure

This post is 100% a CVS receipt of stupid inside baseball. this is exactly the kind of insane grudgebearing that plagues microfamous twitter people, where little nobodies like me get pissed off at an idea of another person that I have made up in my head. I wish I could dig these splinters out of my head, because I miss listening to these people's podcasts

but I am disappointed, not because they are flawed people who make mistakes. but because a good chunk of their grandstanding and hugbox discord communities turned out to just be marketing, and how consistently they failed to clear even the lowest possible moral hurdles as professionals.

there is nothing I can do with this information except try to be a little wiser next time