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The History of the Decline and Fall of [NeoGAF]
Emissary42
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea
This thread is for the discussion of the late NeoGAF forum. It shall remain active until such time as the mods see fit that the discussion of it ends.
+1
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im playing the long game
"Oh boy!
...shit."
On the other hand, it's like being able to say that you sailed into Pompeii on the day of its destruction, then getting out without any graffiti being scratched into the walls to say annoying shit about you millennia later.
Thanks for the link.
Reading it, holy hell.
There's been enough time that you can search around and most people to have a take on it have had their takes.
AFAIK it was known for industry insider leaks and a lot of gaming industry news and such.
Also for some wonky modding policy and apparently sexual abuse.
Yeah. I think I saw Cliff Bleszinski and Jason Schreier post there a few times.
It was very old - Penny Arcade as a comic and NeoGAF were contemporaries in their generation. Because things were looser then, NeoGAF was noted for more leaks and insider news.
Neogaf was PA with less filters, more diversity, and better memes/gifs.
I personally lurked a lot over there. For instance, the Rock Band thread was pretty active unlike ours over here so you could get some awesome news before it was posted back here. Sadly, it appears there was a LOT of drama that wasn't readily apparent from just casual browsing. TBH, I'm gonna miss that place. I was actually looking forward to the usual NPD thread.
Definitely at the start, yes. And in more recent times, beyond certain areas of the site; the others were more like stepping into Libria, but without Christian Bale doing awesome gun-centric martial arts to make up for the rest of it.
The PA boards do need better memes but I'm still not understanding what made the message board iconic other than it was large, old and opposed GG.
Yeah, towards the end I just stuck to the community side rather than offtopic. Never went to gaming side but I don't do that here either so whatev.BVS, tumblr con/fyre festival, and wonder woman threads were a thing of beauty especially when one of the memes we created got posted on real news sites.
Way more indie devs/industry insiders appeared on those boards, even on the offtopic section. Nothing is more amazing than discussing a game or movie only to have the creator pop up to discuss the work directly with you. It was crazy. Also you underestimate the power and grandeur of memes.
Same, I want to hear the Giant Bomb takes on this.
First is back in 2012, when some posts were made accusing EvilLore (site owner) of some impropriety involving doing weird stuff with a girl's photo.
Second phase is earlier this year, when a man in Pennsylvania was arrested for possession of child pornography. This man was known on GAF as Amirox, formerly a moderator on the website, he was stripped of that rank a few years back and EvilLore tried to downplay association with him. He had some history of weird behavior (drugs and an apparently abusive relationship with his mother). The site's reaction to this event was widely criticized as a coverup and a lot of people were banned, threads on the subject were closed.
Third is when the Harvey Weinstein stuff blew up. EvilLore's always had a history of being a bit squirrely as a moderator, which is important context here, but in the wave of accusations about sexual assault and the threads about those accusations on GAF, EL got fairly sensitive about banning people on flimsy pretexts or no pretext at all. This raised some eyebrows.
A few days ago, then, a facebook post was made with a specific accusation against EvilLore. This post was allegedly based off of a leak from an internal moderator conversation. The facebook post was picked up by a GAF member who made a thread about the woman's claims (spoilered details below):
So when this came up to GAF then EvilLore tried to pull from the same playbook: suppress, suppress, suppress. The Moderators wouldn't stand for it and started to jump ship. EvilLore tried to craft a story that the mods were leaving because they had been doxxed, and that brought everyone else down too. Leaderless, the site quickly got swamped by trolls and he had to take the whole thing offline.
In the background of all of this is GAF's long history. Due to EvilLore and others in the administration the site had a history of rubbing people the wrong way. I came to PA from VGChartz, for instance, which was a blocked string on GAF down to its dying day because of the fallout between VGC's founder, ioi, an ex-GAFer, and EvilLore. The story is similar with a long raft of people banned from GAF over the years who started to resent them.
But the bigger issue is a group we can't mention here because of how virulently toxic they are. GAF had a history of being particularly progressive and anti GooberGoose, so the biggest flock of geese on the internet were out to get them, and always waiting to pounce for any sign of weakness.
The important thing is that site leadership did abandon him. They saw all the talk about Weinstein, et al, and took it to heart, and when it was clear that EvilLore was trying to sweep this under the rug they revolted.
Allegedly a replacement site will be up sometime tomorrow. Elements of the old leadership have coding experience and want to strike while the iron is hot and before the base of GAF regulars scatters to the four winds. So this story is still unfolding (also because we have no official response from EvilLore yet).
Edit: the key appeal of the site was its size, but the "secret sauce" that made it get that big was their ability to vet industry insiders. Often whenever you saw a really hot leak/rumor circulate around the internet, the source was GAF. That was because their moderation team had industry connections and so knew how to vet "leakers" to make sure that the site became credible in the minds of gamers, moreso than pretty much anywhere else, especially as the "journalist" websites more and more just became outlets that regurgitated corporate press releases. GAF put the "new" in news and something you couldn't get just anywhere else.
For me, i treasured the site's politics community. I was in a bad way after the 2016 elections and, along with the great community here in D&D, PoliGAF helped me get through that.
Geth, close the thread.