Thanks for your answer and additional information on the two threads.

If you looked in those two threads, I personally called out some of the users as being shills, not regular ggr users.

But there is two problems for outsiders regarding that point:

• they are not going to hunt for the threads themselves and comb through them to see if it's probably shills participating or not. They don't have the time nor the motivation to go through ggr as a whole to finally understand what it stands for, to finally be convinced that it was probably shills participating to the thread. I only lurked 5-6 threads so far, and I'm not entirely convinced: there's a lot of infighting in ggr (well it's a free platform so that's expectable), with some arguments not involving shills but actual participants of ggr.
  
• anon platform = can not certify it's shills beyond reasonable doubt, until admins go through hashes and bring HW in to certify it's indeed the same IP.
  

For people who do not know how an anon chan board system works, or refuse to legitimize it, simply having some anons voicing their disagreement doesn't prove or indicate anything regarding the platform itself - it could very well be shills trying to sabotage an operation endorsed by the regulars of the board.

And an anon board can't reasonably comb through each participants in these threads and certify they're shills or regulars - that would go against the very point of having an anon board vs a name-based one.

'

A representatives-less, individual identity-less group is bound to take flak for whoever pretends to talk in their name, that's inevitable. Chan boards lived with that for years by simply laughing at it and continuing to do their stuff, showing their true identity over the years. If ggr think they can't just laugh it off and want 'The Truth' to be known now and immediately, they need to find a way to have something (human or not) carry that truth in public, in discussions and announcements.

Showing some admin logs to the crowd and telling them "look! the truth is in there!" isn't going to work, common people can't relate to a bunch of screencaps and logs, people are irrational and live their lives with a subjective approach, they're not robots or humans entirely shutting down their emotions.

So why should they trust these logs? They don't know who's the Board Owner and if he would lie/falsify logs, most of them don't know who is HW and if he's any reliable.

If the BO was regularly participating to the public relations (regarding false accusations, controversial threads, etc), then people would begin to see if the BO is a slightly reliable person or not, and see what the BO (and its platform) are trying to achieve. But the whole point of ggr is to keep everyone anons and having the least amount of hierarchy, so the BO is mostly expected to be a hands-off janitor, so he's never going to take the mic to talk with the people outside.

'

I'm afraid ggr is in a situation where they're having their anon cake and don't see why they wouldn't be able to eat it too, like everyone else. But everyone else accepted that eating their anon cake would consume it.

'

Meanwhile, ggr insist that they can eat it and have it at the same time, like some existence quantum state: the group shouldn't be associated with the wrongdoings of anon shills, but the group should be associated with the legitimate activism of anon regulars, without any way to distinguish the two as both are completely free to do whatever they want on the platform (because "freedom of speech").

The only reason to trust ggr would only come from a blind faith in the chan board system, which is a stricly personal belief that more or less establish that even if morally awful things happen on these boards, it's ok because there's probably some good anons too. If we don't believe in that, no anon board can exist, so it's a necessary price to pay to get all the advantages such platform provides to its participants.

On a personal level I used to believe that a lot and I think it remains true for the 00s era and non-publicly-influential/politically-involved boards, but for the rest, manipulative people later learned to exploit that system+belief to sneak their political bullshit in it and steer the anons toward their ideological turf: do controversial (for outsiders)/funny (for anons) actions from a board, outside society bitch about it through its most stupid members, anons rush in to defend the oppressed underdog and generate more funny bitching, "told you so anons! now drink my kool-aids and join my ideological shit". Most anons won't drink it right away, sure, but they'll still let it happen on the board and cheer for it because that produces some funny bitching, until enough anons drink it for it to be openly part of the board's identity.

Imo anons aren't as independent (on the individual level) as they were some years ago, you can no longer count on them to not get lured into joining some shitty ideological activism crap specifically formatted for the chan platform. Thus why I don't buy it that much these days, sure I give a chance to chan boards whenever I hear about them, but the "regulars don't support it, I swear!" card is no longer a free pass to useless dickery.

The we-tolerate-everything policy basically became a loophole for the assholes-with-a-political-goal rather than an actual expression of freedom. Thus why I don't necessarily blame people who can't comprehend that system and belief nowadays, when there isn't much left worth of it.

The thing is, most people out there aren't willing to pay that price [of believing in anon boards] at all, hell they prefer to pay the price of their own privacy (with "social" networks) instead. They massively favor stability (through individual social accountability) over the inherent instability of freedom because they're scared of choices. When I see ggr being mad at the whole ordeal, they seem to skip the part where people don't trust anon boards at all in the first place.

When ggr is all over the "mah PR", they're 100% right within their value system (= PR massively dilutes ideas and values, thus it should be avoided at all cost), but they're absolutely wrong when it comes to simply being relatable "social" entities that people can trust.

That's the only reason a lot of people in gg are tolerating that there's some figureheads doing interviews or being supported on social networks/youtube: a necessary evil to reach people.

If everyone in gaming was an anon we wouldn't even need a gamergate movement: a single mega-thread on all major boards and the SJW problem would be solved overnight. Sadly, it's not the case.

Others just avoided the thread because it was clearly a bait thread. It was up for two weeks, not catching any traction until

/ggrevolt/, how dare you. How fucking dare you.

And that's where he played ggr, and ggr fell for it. Rather than smelling the shilling - even if it wasn't done by hatman it would still be a trap - ggr jumped on the bandwagon to laugh at hatman being a drama whore, in the original thread that was left open for two weeks "because free speech".

If ggr wasn't an anon board firmly defending "freedom of speech", the thread would have been edited or removed, killing off any bad publicity before it showed up. But ggr couldn't do that given its nature.

The only thing that could have "saved" ggr in that situation would have been a majority of posts going against the idea of outing people (showing ggr is against that), so basically siding with hatman. Uh uh, clearly impossible given the circumstances, past interactions between ggr & hatman, and the chan board structure. So the jokes and toshops poured in, just as planned by the hatman.

Then it took off as a "laugh at hatman" thread. No one was attacking him.

Again, people who ever took a look at the chan board culture in the 00s realized the humor there is different. Much more offensive, disgusting, vile - in an fascinating way - but also much more creative and funnier, by not giving a shit about what would be over the line. But for the rest of the population... They never heard about it, or completely rejected it: what is a funny joke for ggr (like spamming porn shops of him/his gf), can be just plain wrong for other people.

Written like that it sounds like the world is full of SJW crybabies, but that's only if the title of SJW is automatically awarded to anyone feeling more humane emotions than oneself: simply because someone can't jerk off to execution videos doesn't mean they're automatically pro-SJW. At some point ggr needs to understand that people outside of the board perceive things differently and that it's still a somewhat legitimate subjectivity, even if it involves emotions - a concept that isn't automatically threatening freedom.

Here's TheHat2 just brushing off his actions as "since I have the support of the community, I can do whatever I want"

I think everyone figured out hatman is a dick. But there's actual reasons why he's being favored over ggr and why people don't seem to mind what he did during the feud - most reasons are listed above.

He acted like a subjective human with emotions (including empathy), ggr acted like a chan board. That's all you need to know: people work like tribes, they favor people who are the closest to their values. The fact that he was manipulative is secondary, expressing subjective emotions and empathy comes first for most humans.

The ggr board is so fundamentally different from kia or most of gg on so many points, that it's much more logical for kia/gg people to feel empathy for hatman burning a fuse, than feeling empathy for ggr falling for a trap. Humans are that fallible. So either exploit it, work with it or endure it, but you can't change it. "Mah PR" is solely about that: interacting with fallible humans.