Maybe if they didn't bury those legitimate gripes in mounds of shit they would have been taken seriously
Agreed. When your movement is so hateful and toxic that Breitbart is one of your chief media proponents, you got to purge your ranks of the crazy. The problem is, as someone mentioned a couple of pages back, that there's no real way to reel in GamerGate. Anyone can do anything under the label.
I find myself in the "middle" but there isn't a true center. The most vocal and obvious pro-GGers are so unhinged and unwilling to stick to the issue of corruption that's important to me, I can't be a part of that. I'm not the stereotypical gamer; I'm not white, I'm older, extremely liberal, I have a wife and daughters who love gaming... #NotYourShield is not for me, because I don't think it's acceptable to hide your hatred of minority groups behind a few token individuals. I guess GamerGate was bound to end up like this, as the Zoe Quinn thing touched a nerve with a lot of MRAs and other right-wingers, and they ended up leading the charge. I post on another, very old gaming site that is strongly pro-GG, and this describes most of their community.
On the other hand, the other side has some bad apples too; opportunists who used this controversy as a way to grab more fame for themselves, but who really haven't contributed significantly to gaming. Also, we have to be careful who we are defending. My baseline is "harassment is never acceptable". At the same time, going back to the beginning, I hesitated defending someone who self-identifies as a feminist, but allegedly has a huge disconnect between that identity and her personal choices. Still, while that disconnect may have undermined Quinn's credibility as a mouthpiece, it in no way justifies what happened to her.
There's some fault on both sides, but not equivalence, I guess is what I'm saying. I just wish that the legit issues of the portrayal of women/minorities in gaming, or the corruption in game journalism, were the focal point of GamerGate, and not he said/she said, with dozens of minor Internet celebrities fighting for the spotlight