Wondermark comic by David Malki. Click to see the source.
In a new post on Medium, Andy Baio (creator of Upcoming, former board member and CTO of Kickstarter, blogger at Waxy.org, co-founder of the XOXO Festival, and yes, a friend of mine) writes:
Two months ago today, actor Adam Baldwin was the first to use the #Gamergate hashtag on Twitter, solidifying a name for the movement that’s dominated all conversations in gaming since. Depending on where you sit on the issue, it’s either a widespread campaign of harassment against women or, actually, about ethics in videogames journalism.
Anyone who’s mentioned the #Gamergate hashtag in a critical light knows the feeling: a swarm of seemingly random, largely-anonymous people descending to comment and criticize.
I’ve been using Twitter for eight years, but I’ve never seen behavior quite like this. This swarming behavior is so prevalent, it got a new nickname — “sea lioning,” inspired by David Malki’s Wondermark comic [pictured above — Joey].
Also worth reading: Andy’s essay, in which he describes his findings from running an analysis of three days’ worth of tweets with the hashtags #Gamergate and #NotYourShield. His findings:
The concluding statement is a good summary:
This network visualization is as good a metaphor as any for #Gamergate. Two massive, impenetrable hairballs of people that want little to do with one another, only listening to their side and firing volleys across the chasm.
Andy’s made his data available to everyone. If you’ve got the time and the data-crunching skills, you can download the data he used in CSV format or as a MySQL dump (each is about 40MB in size).
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