How Kotaku and Gawker Media Lost a Reader

@reverendk: We are essentially Gawker-lite, this shouldn't be a surprise. I just wish we would stop pretending we have any credibility, the hypocrisy in the air makes it difficult to breathe. Just to be clear we have people in here defending Gawker posting nazi propaganda, just because you dress it up under the guise of shit like "Better them than 4chan" doesn't make it appropriate. So if 4chan had done the same damn thing would they be afforded this fair of a shake? Would this topic live more than 30 minutes? No!, the answer is NO!. Our community needs to spend some real time reflecting on what we stand for.

If our new tolerance level for hate speech is simply negated by "not as bad as 4chan" then we have really hit a new low.

I am drinking a delicious Cherry Coke right now...

This burns me in so many ways right now and I hope i'm not the only one seeing it. We take hardline stances around here on harassment, deaththreats, misogyny and all elements that contribute to what makes gaming so inherently negative at this time. I've never seen this dismissive attitude followed by "Oh, that's just the internet being the internet" when any of those topics are involved. Yet, here we are dismissing any accountability and responsibility from Gawker because "Oh, that's just Gawker being Gawker". We need consistency, either all of it is ok or none of it is, the mental leaps to justify this only further serves to prove my point and the demonstrated hesitancy to condemn this in the strongest possible terms makes me sick.

GUYS LET'S GO GET 'EM- FREE COKES ON ME!

I've recently found that posting The Clash songs works beautifully for almost every thread on GB these days.

On topic, I don't think the idea of playing a joke on Coca Cola in itself is a bad one. Quotes from Scar Face or Reservoir Dogs to the pictures of puppies dancing, and the like, would've gotten a laugh out of me, but what boggles my mind is how they settled on Mein Kampf. That's a tasteless and immature decision by any standard. Kind of thing I'd expect from an "edgy" teenager, not a "professional" journalism outlet. (Do I put quotation marks around 'professional' or 'journalism' here?)

Nobody who's ever read up on Coca Cola are going to like, or respect, them as a company, but they're not going anywhere. They're going to continue to sell, and they don't even need the advertisement to do so any more. They've long since become considerably more than a product, they're a symbol. Having Gawker shit on one of the first genuinely positive things they've done in some time isn't a win for anyone. It simply reinforces the notion that the internet is far beyond saving, and that creativity and positivity has no place in social media.

I don't see what Kotaku has to do with this, though. Can we get Scoops to comment?

Coca-Cola is shitty but all this hurts is the guy who runs the Twitter account. This is like when a restaurant does something shitty so people start uploading videos of them harassing the cashier, except it's a "news" site doing it.

@reverendk: I was replying at you at the time cause I felt like you had highlighted some key points of past gawker history, my overall reply was largely directed at the larger narrative in the thread, sorry for confusion.

Yup, Gawker is fucking disgusting and gives zero fucks on their quest to get all the clicks they can possibly get. Only thing people can do to hurt them is to simply move on and ignore

@donutfever: I'd argue it's more like when someone gets people to play a scripted role in a video then hold that video up as evidence of societal issues like "This thing is bad because we made it do a bad thing so we could talk about how bad it is!"

When you start with "most of us are horrible people", I just can't read the rest because I know its written by someone who outsources his thinking. (especially since you gave the statement credit)

@gamefreak9:

100% agree, what is it these day with people and severe self loathing?

This. I'm not exactly sure how spamming the most notorious example of hatred "shows" Coca-Cola here. I'm plenty jaded and all, and I'll admit that part of me found the Make It Happy marketing a bit saccharine (sorry, couldn't help myself), but Gawker just managed to exemplify the very negativity that Coca-Cola was targeting with their ad. So not only did Gawker basically side with/directly promote hate speech, they pretty much validated the need for the campaign they're mocking in the first place, and in doing so, demonstrated some real hypocrisy while posturing as if they're some moral authority. That's some stellar work there.

self loathing, not quite. I just see a hesitancy to accept any responsibility. I could care less about fitting into the group think on this topic, I know where I stand. I'm not bound by some connection to an ideology that prevents me from condemning Gawker just as strong as internet harassers, being bound to "outsourced" thinking is what causes situational responses to hate speech on the internet, particularly when it's a garbled response simply because of where it is coming from and not what is being said.

It's easy to take hardline stance against terrible things perpetrated by faceless people from god knows where. Doing the same with a large corporation not so much.

Wait what?

Typical morally bankrupt gawker trash, whenever I get suckered into an occasional worthwhile article of theirs it isn't long before they do something like this reminds me of how little they care about how they conduct themselves.

They could have chosen to pull their stunt on Coca-cola with any text they wanted to and it would have worked and no one would have been bothered by it, instead the chose hate speech propaganda from one of the worst humans in history.

Gawker is pretty terrible with the exception of the Dead Wrestler of the Week feature on Deadspin.

IT'S ALWAYS SO GOOD TO TALK ABOUT GAWKER ON THE INTERNET

Man, fuck you all, I like me a Coke.

Yeah, I said it. I like Coca-Cola.

QFT

Bad people choose Pepsi

First of all, thank you all for a fantastic mix of insightful and hilarious commentary. I've responded to a few comments below.

I was never an avid Gawker reader, but I used to read Kotaku daily (which is part of their conglomerate). Obviously, as mentioned above, that is no longer the case.

Hahaha. I love this thought.

This is a fair point. I'm not really one for boycotts, but there is a lot of crosstalk between the different Gawker sites so that may be part of why I don't even want to head to Kotaku.

That is just fantastic.

This pretty well sums up my thoughts in an even more concise approach.

I also like Coke! And Kotaku! It's a complex world we live in.

@reverendk said:

@dudeglove: Don't forget that they refused to take down the Hulk Hogan sex tape, published a Jezebel article bragging about beating up boyfriends, and produced a minimum of three Max-Temkin-is-a-terrible-person-because-of-something-someone-said-on-the-internet type articles.

Don't think that stops them from moralizing at other people though, which is ok for them to do because....um....oh jeeze. Leaking that Tarentino script was pretty cool, right? Not as cool as Disney prince junk galleries or...actually you know what? This one kind of stands on it's own.

I always do a double take when people talk about reading gawker sites.

Geez, I'd never heard about that last one. What a bunch of fucking idiots.

Yup, pretty much scum.
But I really hate everyone who tries to hard to push an overly political correct view.

@cheappoison:

I'd prefer political correctness to promoting Mein Kampf without any context for understanding what it is and how it should be approached.

I'm bad people.

@fredchuckdave: Behind Closed Ovens is a really entertaining column on Jezebel about crazy food service industry stories. Not a fan of the rest of that site, but that column has brought me a lot of laughs.

Meh. Gawker hasn't been good in a long time, if it ever was.

The internet has always had a profit problem, especially with content producing sites. I think Giant Bomb has struck a good balance, but a paid-subscription content has not historically worked out for non-video content, and even less for news sites in general. Or entertainment news in this case. Whatever.

The winning strategies for these sites seems to be clickbait and/or pandering to passionate people. This stunt hit both, and any negative press is likely just drawing more passionate defenders who might otherwise not have been exposed to this content. It's all very win-win for Gawker.

It may feel good to vent, but it's only a temporary reprise. I have to imagine most responding here have already formed an opinion on Gawker.

You mean the thousand other messed up things Gawker has done didn't get you to leave before? They have done far worse things than this. Just recently they attempted to shift the rape accusations regarding Dunham's garbage claim on some innocent dude on campus to another random Republican on campus when she was there. Going as far to name him with zero fucking evidence. The guy should sue the shit out of them.

#Coca-ColaMatters