Show me one place on Giant Bomb where we force your content onto Facebook? Show me one place where we don't ask you to click a button to push your content somewhere. Find the place where Giant Bomb spams you. Find the preference that sends you tons of email as a new user without your permission.
Reality: Facebook is huge. It's the largest site in the world. We can't avoid it. It's just there and people use it everyday. There are many ways this integration could have gone down. We could have forced every comment/post/review you made to automatically push to facebook and twitter. We could have been THAT company. We didn't. We did the best we could. We made it no more than 25 pixels in height and asked you if you wanted to share your content with others instead of just doing it without your permission. We asked you to not only push one button, but push many other buttons after that to make sure you were OK with it. We did this because we hate when other websites force that decision on us.
Facebook is what it is. You having to see a very small blue button on your page is not the end of the world. This is beyond reactionary. It's just silly. Will we eventually add a preference to turn them off? Yeah, probably, when we're done capitulating to the dozens of other bugs we deal with on a daily basis. When have we not caved into user concern over this kind of stuff? When has Giant Bomb not been the site that doesn't take ethical user procedures to heart? When have we not been clean with our audience about our intentions? We have fucking preferences to turn off god damned editorial off from OUR OWN message board, how does that even make sense? That's why you are here, because we're not fucking IGN. But to simply assume in so calice a tone that we're evil for giving people the option to share their interests with their friends is just wrong.
Seriously. Show me one place on this site where we don't expressly ask your permission for something. Show me one place where the action you took requires an extra click of bullshit to get through. It doesn't exist. I know because I designed every part of it. And it was designed with a purpose. To be the best mother-fucking best gaming website in the world. We're either that or we're some evil monopoly forcing ad, Twitter, Email and Facebook spam on you without your permission.
This is the most ethical site on the Internet of its size. From its Editorial team to its Engineering team. Sweep. Love you tons, followed your stuff and you've been an amazing contributor to the site over the years. But you're just wrong here. We've done nothing to your experience but add a couple avoidable small footprint buttons to the site. You're over-reacting. You're causing a fuss.
As for your community rants over the past couple weeks. Giant Bomb is no different than the rest of the Internet. If you want to have your shit seen, you need to market yourself. We provide the best tools we can to allow you to create your content, but it's up to you to make sure that content is viewed. That is not our responsibility. I didn't sit on GeoCities for years trying to plug my Xwing VS TIE Fighter site, I went outside to other sites to try and get my stuff seen. There's really only so much we can do. Show me a large editorial site that does it better and I'll do my best to imitate it. Fuck man. Show me one site that even allows your blog to be broadcast outside of a profile page!
You've got plenty of options when it comes to gaming sites. Gamespot, 1up, IGN and the like. When it comes to community, I know we're better. So do you. You want a site that focuses on the community over the editorial? Go to any of our game pages. You'll see small summaries of editorial comment and large sections of community content. That was and is still fucking risky for us. We get shit about it every day from advertisers. Show me one other editorial game site (scratch that, editorial site in general) where you can search for a topic and see the editorial content as the minority of the page layout. I'm not talking wikipedia, this site has professional, best of breed reviewers. We're literally gagging them on game pages to push user content forward. It's insane. We shouldn't be doing it. But we realize our content gets stale and only a thriving community of fans can keep game pages fresh.
As for everyone who doesn't want their "friends" to know about their life on Giant Bomb... you have two options. Find better friends who accept you as you are or don't click the small ass buttons that pop up. It's a pretty easy decision. But don't blame Giant Bomb because you're trying to hide your passions from your friends. Do not be afraid of who you are.
Gaming is fucking cool. Don't be ashamed. IceWind Dale II love needs to be spread!
We'll likely add a preferences option within the next week or so, but for now there are bigger problems to solve. Not against the idea for logged in users.
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