By the way, if I don't see a post from staff here directly telling us that the accounts that are, for some reason, bringing up the protests about "police brutality" or complaining about "politics" have been banned entirely, I'm going to assume that they're welcome here. I know that you all are reading this. It's no longer and has never been enough to silently brush them aside. You need to actively curate. I've seen enough of this garbage on comments here over the years, and I'm always disgusted when I read them. Please step up. I don't mean to make you personally feel bad, because I genuinely do love you all, but enough is enough. Business is no longer a valid reason to keep these assholes around.
Agreeing strongly that something needs to change with how things like this are handled.
About to start listening to this episode so I haven't heard what's said in it yet, but generally speaking I think the staff have made good steps forward when it comes to actually talking about these issues. That is a very welcome change because even if I trust the staff to be good people, there are plenty of others who will mindlessly think you believe in the same hateful rhetoric as them if you don't directly tell them otherwise. That may sound a bit ridiculous but I saw that happen constantly back when Gamergate was in full swing, and even before; always felt like people listened to the podcasts week after weeks for years and just assumed the staff were their buds who bought into the same shit. And that assumption that is now much less viable for them than it was years back, and I'm very thankful for that.
But.. that just means every time I click into the comments on something here and see absolute garbage mixed in it's just even more disappointing. People aren't going to agree on serious issues 100% of the time, sure, but it feels like there's some real basic stuff that the ball gets dropped on when it comes to what viewpoints are allowed here. I assume there's a lot more bad stuff that gets dealt with, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying nothing is done, I know effort goes into moderating and I don't doubt their intentions. But it still feels visibly lacking just about every time I look at comments and that's a bad sign.
We don't need people comparing what happened this week to BLM here. That should pretty obviously be the kind of person who isn't contributing anything to a conversation except discomfort, while wasting the time and effort of others who actually try to engage with them in good faith. There are good well thought out comments on this page that nobody should have needed to spend time typing, because the person they're explaining things to should not have been able to post what they did to begin with.
@bta: If I do a search for her name on that Vice thread I get someone accusing her of biphobia and racism without any proof. Then a quoted tweet where someone calls her an abuser, again without any detail. Not even a vague claim of abuse, just someone saying she's abusive without providing any context at all. Literally nothing. Zip. Zilch. I could go on GB's forums and say "BTA has a history of abuse" and it would be just as substantive and trustworthy as this thread. The end.
Done commenting on your crap, you're so dedicated to smearing Abby and Merritt's names that you're downright suspect at this point. Gross.
We and others have been over the allegations and finding them at this point. Clearly nothing I can say is affecting anything here. But the thing that really confuses me despite that: how could I even possibly be smearing Abby's name? Like... what are you even talking about? What would the "smear" even be?
I think the worst you could take away from what I've said regarding her is like... "maybe she was rushing to get guests and didn't search as well she should have as a result", or that she should probably put the note in the audio? That's about it, and I don't think that's any sort of "smear". If you're misreading me talking about it being relatively easy to find that much as saying something about her... it wasn't, because she's not in here pushing back against the idea and so isn't who I was talking to? I have no idea what her process was beyond the fact that it missed things, and that's my only feeling on it.
I will again say that unlike some other people here who seem to be using this as an excuse to complain about recent events, I am genuinely 100% unironically glad that she - and Alex and Vinny too, she wasn't the only one who said something and it's pretty telling that people frame it that way when attacking her - said that they wanted to be more careful with who they let on their platform. It was really meaningful to me to hear that, and especially for the staff members who were around Max Temkin to finally acknowledge that they were complicit. So the only mistake here was the vetting process, and that's all, and I fully believe they'll do better next time. And I want to be clear that it'd be pretty unfair to say that any issue with the process would be on her alone anyway, because the other hosts need to participate in making that process too, and the only reason she had to be the one to do any of this to begin with was that they were away.
But honestly, I feel like I've been pretty clear on that at this point, at length. And yet you're really going to go all in on calling me gross while meanwhile there's other people here gleefully whining about how Abby thinks abuse allegations are worth caring about in general. So your behavior seems pretty suspect to me in turn. But whatever, I guess that's that for me too. Have fun with that.
@bta: For someone to see that twitter thread and get "Merrit K has claims of abuse against her" you really have to go in knowing a lot of context. And again, it's not easy to find. And again, if you Google "merrit K abuse" that thread DOES NOT SHOW UP. A vice thread shows up, and it's impossible to search because Vice forums are a garbage fire.
As for being "biphobic", whatever. Someone can accuse someone of anything. And again, the alleged "biphobic" comments ARE NOT EASY TO SEE in a simple Google search.
Holier than bullshit, nothing but.
Yes, a Vice thread shows up, and it's not impossible to search. If you press control+f, as you would to search literally any other page anyway, a search bar shows up for searching within the thread. Type "merritt k", the words you know will be there because you saw the text preview. You'll get both posts with links to all the tweets about her, including that Twitter thread, but also the abuse allegations directly. What exactly about that was impossible?
This is a literal single minute of looking with multiple immediately relevant search results. That is pretty fucking easy to find, all things considered. It's not like you have to dig pages back on Google or go through some obscure website or reach out to anyone. It's literally looking through a forum thread for the words that immediately popped up when you searched within the first few results on Google. It is seriously not hard and it's pretty ridiculous to act like that took any effort at all.
I don't even know what the supposedly holier than bullshit here is. I'm not saying there's tons of information out there on this. I'm saying that someone thinking "I need to vet the guests I'm thinking of inviting to see if there's anything out there I don't know about" could find that there's something they need to look further into well within the amount of time they should set aside for that task! I don't know if you're conflating me with people who are attacking Abby or what, because I'm not interested in doing that at all; I just think this was a mistake that should be learned from when it comes to their vetting process - and that's all, she's not a hypocrite or dishonest or whatever gross thing others have said, she just needed to take some time to make sure nothing was out there. And if your argument is really that they shouldn't even spend a single minute looking for things, then they might as well not even try.
That might not, but "merritt k abuse" will definitely get you some things! And that's the kind of thing you should probably be searching if you want to vet for this stuff.
No. It doesn't. If you google that, the first thing you get is her wiki page (because Google is broken). Then a reddit thread about this very podcast. Then a thread about something unrelated where someone accuses Merrit of being biphobic. Then various things that Merrit K has written about abuse.
If the allegations against Merrit are so substantial and trustworthy, why do you have post after post in this thread where you lie about them? Disgusting.
I'm not lying, you're just not looking. The thread where someone accuses Merritt of being biphobic has 2 posts with links to all the Twitter stuff we've been talking about, one being the post with the preview text and one being another a few posts down by the same poster that includes Merritt's name in it. Someone being biphobic is also a reason not to invite them, so one would expect you'd click through and investigate that to begin with, even if it turns out that they're not abusive.
And obviously you wouldn't have gotten the Reddit thread a few days ago, as it didn't exist.
I find it kinda hard to believe you looked for 2 hours and apparently only found the very first thing linked about her. To be clear, the one incident you're describing is absolutely not the reason people said she was being biphobic or insulting nonbinary people, nor is it the damning evidence of abuse. All of those things are entirely separate things she did both from that incident and from each other; you got lost and are judging people based on the wrong hill, so to speak. And some of it's going to be inherently hard to drag up, it should be said, because they're deleted tweets. If you don't happen to remember exactly who took a screenshot - if anyone even did - and exactly how they shared that and/or the exact time it happened... it's obviously understandable to want to see the specifics to judge, but people not immediately having that ready to go doesn't mean it didn't happen.
In any case, you can scroll up my post at the top of this page for more of what's out there, especially regarding the abuse. That all takes about a minute to find from where the incident you're talking about was linked to begin with.
I wasn't referring to only one incident. It seems like there are multiple instances of people getting in professional scrapes and then turning it into abuse because they are mad and I say that because your own content also contains people saying the messengers are abusive themselves and can't be trusted. If anything I spent too much time reading what you have provided, finding all the mud in the water you found clear. You picked a side, that's fine, I'm not demanding beyond a reasonable doubt from you, but you can't point to what you pointed to and say it's clear that if you don't pick a side you are an enabler. Maybe that is because all I know about any of these people is what was said in a bunch of disparate tweet threads and other boards pointing to tweet threads. Entirely theoretical people accusing each other of being the most heinous. But, that's all anyone is going to know about these people when deciding to interact with them from the outside of this insular group. How is any reaction to that clearly correct or clearly wrong?
I understand your feelings, but that thread does not say that everything Porpentine says is outright false. It calls her a hypocrite - she did some of the same abusive things she accuses Merritt of doing. But it still acknowledges that Merritt could easily have done things to people (even if not to Porpentine) and talks about her the same way.
I don't know what else to tell you, seriously. This happened in an insular group that's largely faded away, so you're getting little views into that group. I've said this throughout this thread but nobody involved here is a nobody, these are award-winning game designers who each have their own Wikipedia page, they're all notable in their field, they're just not around as much publicly anymore and you haven't heard of them.
If you want my honest opinion on how it feels to talk about all this, I really don't like having to constantly try to explain everything to people on these terms! I've done it because I think people are outright dismissing the allegations and that's not great, but I also don't like how people are learning about everything in only this one way. The reason I am uncomfortable with Merritt began with the shitty things she said herself publicly over and over. I think that's true for a lot of people who are uncomfortable with her. That's certainly not abuse, but it still makes her someone you don't want to be given more and more power and prominence. And I do believe the abuse allegations and I think that's true for the others who heard about them later, but I also think a lot of people who feel they've been unable to ever get anyone to listen to them would be happy if we could just talk about what she's said publicly in addition to what she's done privately. Instead all of those things have now become part of "you say she's abusive? but this random stuff doesn't look like abuse" when people's introduction to that stuff is only as a weird jumbled side-note thanks to things like that Twitter thread.
So... yeah. I wish we could talk about those things in addition to her apparently being abusive, but instead it's become entirely about the allegations and how the other things are not abuse. But when people had issues with what she said... they weren't ever saying it was abuse, they were saying it was shitty and exclusionary! Abuse wasn't part of the framing. They were not intended to be bullet points in a list of reasons why Merritt is abusive. And the presentation of them that way is only done in retrospect and, though I might be wrong, even that Twitter thread is by someone I don't think actually saw that stuff first hand. I understand how this all happened and why people react how they do, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly, but it is frustrating that this is what the conversation is now.
That aside, I'm not sure what kind of vetting machine people think exists, but even as of right now, putting "merritt k" into various search engines doesn't bring up any allegations or controversies—with the exception of the Giant Bomb reddit thread that was created just yesterday. I'm not saying it's excusable or a ticket to freedom from responsibility, but the producer's note seems completely understandable. Something that was louder in other circles is now louder in this one as well.
That might not, but "merritt k abuse" will definitely get you some things! And that's the kind of thing you should probably be searching if you want to vet for this stuff. Just their name is kinda silly as that would be way way more likely to just get you their social media pages, articles they've written, and other stuff just generically about them, y'know?
Duly noted, but please understand how obscure or hidden this controversy may be. This is like if the "missing stair" was on a step that most people unconsciously skipped anyway. There are other people in the comments saying they had difficulty finding information about this, so it may be easier for you to get results based on your search history and previous interactions on the Internet. But from a vanilla, clean-slate search, even including terms like "abuse" and "allegations" only brings up that reddit thread and (further down) two links to discussion boards that mention merritt k along with a flood of other people back when the Alec Holowka story broke. Granted, one of those is the Waypoint discussion that would definitely raise red flags if it were seen, but you do have to actively search for it if you're uninitiated. Like, you have to intentionally step on each stair even if it's inconveniently placed or easily skippable.
Thanks for sharing this otherwise hidden information and bringing the inequity into light, as it were. There's something to be said about how now if you just put plain old "merritt k" into a clean-slate search engine, these allegations show up with more visibility. Ultimately, people have to decide on their own what is (not) acceptable, and it's arguably easier to make an educated decision when the information and/or evidence is readily available.
I don't actually think this is all that obscure, relatively speaking? Even being able to Google it and get those 2 relevant results relatively quickly kinda knocks it out of that tier. I'm seriously not saying that just to be picky, to be clear. It's more like... I want to be sure there's room for stuff that actually is much harder to find than this to still be seen as valid, if that makes sense?
I'm definitely sympathetic to the idea that people were having a lot of trouble finding and parsing stuff and I know I have way more context than most. As I've said, that's part of the issue here - it's not something that's ever been given the chance to catch on. I just also find it kinda obvious that a few people here and more so on the subreddit basically could not scroll down that (again, definitely messy/badly focused, but also not very long) first Twitter thread and just gave up and dismissed it. They're probably just a vocal minority but it's frustrating to spend time discussing this stuff only to be faced with that. Honestly, a lot of this is inherently personally weird/frustrating to see - as much as I understand exactly what people feel when first hearing about this stuff, and as much as there's the side of things where I'm just happy that at least people are talking about it at all... it is just weird to see people suddenly scrutinizing little bits and pieces pulled out of place from years ago. The people involved with the abuse allegations, in particular... having to even think about some of them is sending bits and pieces of stuff that happened like 5 or 6 years ago through my head for the first time in a while.
In any case, we can certainly agree that it's good that it's finally gotten some traction and people can more readily access more information to work with. Definitely good that that's chagned.
it’s SO weird how all this digging deeeeeeep to find whatever they can about someone is happening on the first all femme podcast they’ve done man that is just sooooo wacky!
This is seriously not how this happened, even if some co-opting has potentially happened. I can say that people I follow on Twitter - and who are absolutely not men - immediately reacted to the announcement of her being on the podcast. Because they all knew about her already. I knew about her already. And I have for years! Absolutely nothing about her actually had to be dug up. The shit she said was stuff people - me included, for some of it - saw happen live, and people reacted to it live, for years. And the abuse allegations aren't exactly news either.
The only way in which anything here has been "dug up" is just people demanding proof and... well, that messy Twitter thread is pretty much what currently exists. But it is in no way the origin of people's issues with Merritt, it's just an iffy documentation of it. It would obviously be way better if there was one clean thing to point to, that actually laid things out clearly and in a way that each part deserves, but seeing as that doesn't exist, what's the solution? That it is hard to find something better is in many ways the point! Anytime anyone said anything it didn't get anywhere. People who tried gave up. Nobody around Merritt cared enough to do anything but support her. I think this is literally the first time any of it has actually gotten anywhere meaningful.
So I get the concern. It's warranted. But in this case it is is 100% absolutely not a case of "bad actors dragged up a woman's very old tweets". And, well, frankly you can pretty easily tell who doesn't actually care about what they're talking about here, because that group seems incapable of not centering their thoughts entirely around Matt Pascual.
I've now spent about 2 hours looking for reasons that Merritt K should be obviously beyond the pale to have as a guest and I'm even less certain of that stance than I was before I started. There's no smoking gun here, and avoiding all people who have ever had a public disagreement with anyone is a useless metric. Not liking trans people or bi people and not liking a specific person for specific works they've done in their professional capacity are different things. The supposedly damning evidence doesn't even strike me as particularly dickish. This is a strange hill to be furious on.
I find it kinda hard to believe you looked for 2 hours and apparently only found the very first thing linked about her. To be clear, the one incident you're describing is absolutely not the reason people said she was being biphobic or insulting nonbinary people, nor is it the damning evidence of abuse. All of those things are entirely separate things she did both from that incident and from each other; you got lost and are judging people based on the wrong hill, so to speak. And some of it's going to be inherently hard to drag up, it should be said, because they're deleted tweets. If you don't happen to remember exactly who took a screenshot - if anyone even did - and exactly how they shared that and/or the exact time it happened... it's obviously understandable to want to see the specifics to judge, but people not immediately having that ready to go doesn't mean it didn't happen.
In any case, you can scroll up my post at the top of this page for more of what's out there, especially regarding the abuse. That all takes about a minute to find from where the incident you're talking about was linked to begin with.
Wanted to say that the kind of downplaying that's going on in some of these comments is a big part of why abusers are able to stay in the game industry--when you try to come forward and everyone hems and haws about your account, eventually you get whittled down and you get tired of trying at all. I didn't see the pattern until I experienced abuse in an industry. It's how Merritt remains surrounded and supported by well-meaning people who bring a good look via association, and eventually gets on other platforms. It's how the allegations eventually become hard to look up. It's part of the process that allows abusers to thrive, and it sucks to see it happening live.
The amount of people she's hurt who won't talk about it anymore is astounding compared to what you're able to see with a Google search. And victims of abuse certainly aren't gonna be looking toward the GB community for help, now.
It especially hurts seeing people swooping in just to say they see nothing wrong with this.
Agreed. I've tried to do what I can here, but at the end of the day, the comments dismissing this and complaining being "canceled" just make me tired. It is ridiculously out of touch and so overly eager to give people opportunities to do harm time after time, and only serves to make it easier for it to keep happening.
I think it's ridiculous to blackball someone from the industry if they've been shitty a few times. Wait til all these outraged people discover that you probably interact with emotional abusers all the time - they just don't have a public Twitter thread of "receipts". People deserve second chances but call them out on their shit if you see it. These people don't disappear if you stop inviting them on podcasts.
I feel like none of what you've said here reflects reality?
What is this imaginary situation where people actually called her out on her shit, as you put it? Nobody has done that. The people upset with her being on this podcast can't do that; that's on her peers, who have refused to ever do it. That's the thing people want here. That first step. She is still, inexplicably, on her first chance.
The other things you're complaining about don't exactly reflect this situation at all so whatever you're working through there, not sure how it's relevant to this.
That aside, I'm not sure what kind of vetting machine people think exists, but even as of right now, putting "merritt k" into various search engines doesn't bring up any allegations or controversies—with the exception of the Giant Bomb reddit thread that was created just yesterday. I'm not saying it's excusable or a ticket to freedom from responsibility, but the producer's note seems completely understandable. Something that was louder in other circles is now louder in this one as well.
That might not, but "merritt k abuse" will definitely get you some things! And that's the kind of thing you should probably be searching if you want to vet for this stuff. Just their name is kinda silly as that would be way way more likely to just get you their social media pages, articles they've written, and other stuff just generically about them, y'know?
Still, you're right that the past day has messed with things as that reddit thread is showing up high in the results, yeah. But there's still info in the top few results. The title of what appears may seem unrelated, but the preview text that shows up is very clearly about her and is concerning enough to warrant diving in to see if it's true, even if it's not about the abuse. Similarly how easy it is to follow through those links to reach that is debatable, but, well... you're just not always going to find a clear info dump, and you can still get to it within a minute if you don't immediately give up, which you shouldn't after seeing that preview text.
Like you can say any and all of that stuff is a barrier to finding it, but... you gotta spend a few minutes looking into it, at least. Here it's like a minute of work and hardly any effort; once you've seen a hint of something existing in particular, you should understand that there's something to find even if it's not served right up to you.
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