Many of you noticed the mainpaging event from my gaming harassment story (the offer to take up a collection fund for me should this thing go to Kotaku was heartwarming, btw!), and I know many of you, having been in that situation, have been cringing on my behalf because trolls.

Interestingly, I woke up to a ton of alerts, realized I'd made mainpage, and started going through them and seeing some trolls sniping, "I bet this comment is going to get dismissed just like my last one!" Which was interesting — I hadn't dismissed anything, as I didn't even know it had gone mainpage til this morning. And scrolling over the comments, I saw the magnificent Slay Belle, who mentioned that if anything, this article had given her a list of people to ban from GT.

And it clicked — I didn't have to wrestle as many trolls, because the mods were dismissing them for me. The blatant, super obvious, pure venom trolls were being cleared, while the Not-Sure-If-Trolling-Or-Just-Hyper-Unaware comments were left for me to deal with.

And you know, I had to come here to say that that was such an amazing thing, and something I appreciate so very much. Since we don't have a say on what goes mainpage, when it does, knowing that the mods are looking out for us and trying to weed out the purely provocative comments so that we can focus on really interacting with dissenting and agreeing viewpoints both makes the prospect of being mainpaged much less daunting.

So thanks, Slay Belle. Knowing you're looking out for us made me feel really good this morning.


It irked me that so many of the comments were cries of "shoddy journalism! Burn herrrrr!" when I was a journalism major and that's my background, but this was so clearly NOT a reporting piece. Given the lack of details, this could never have been written like an actual news story, which was why it was me just editorializing all over the place. But, hey, that's the price you pay for being online, and it was a fair point that I wish there had been more info to share — but if this creates more awareness for the story once details DO come out, all the better. And seeing other GTers rise to my defense was also really, really awesome.

As always, it was a downer to see how many people used the lack of names as an excuse to immediately dismiss ANY validity this woman's story might have had. Which just shows how many people look for an excuse to not have to think about things like this. But you know what? There were so many truly interesting and great discussions on this article today that I don't even care right now. I read through all the comments and was intrigued, interested, and proud to be part of this forum.


As long as it doesn't go to Kotaku :)