You Don't Look Like a Gamer: On Toxicity, Gatekeeping, & Women Who Share Gaming

vkou

The first thing that socially excluded nerds do after they find a community that accepts them is, of course, raise barriers and gates to keep out other people who don't confirm to their particular monoculture. Which is a shame. It's a digital medium, it's not a limited consumable, you should derive nothing but joy from other people sharing your hobby. It is getting better, though. Every year, it feels like there are more and more spaces with a cardinal rule - if your behaviour on the net, makes other people feel unwelcome - you are not welcome.

dartharva

All he brings up are social media comments, which may have been mildly representative of people more than a decade ago, but in the present-day are widely understood to be completely immaterial.

madrox

I find it odd that the negative posts the author deputizes are pretty downvoted. The Reddit thread in particular has the reply calling the commenter out having significantly more upvotes. The twitter post in the screenshot has no engagement. I doubt these got surfaced in any meaningful way to other users. That isn’t to say the author is wrong, exactly, but you can Chinese Robber Fallacy any kind of toxicity on social media these days. What I’ve found matters a lot more in communities is active moderation against bad behavior. Even the author acknowledges these posts got removed, but treats it like a bookend as though it’s an admission of failure. However, talking about the importance of actively curating community isn’t as interesting, I guess. Mods continue to be the least appreciated job on the internet. PS love you dang.

rasse

Part of the problem seems to be imposing labels and identities on yourself and others. There's a saying that labels make you dumber and the (largely downvoted) comments mentioned in the article demonstrate this.

diogenescynic

People love being the victim.