I reported them for harassment with the following statement:
The purpose of this group is to review bomb any game that has gay representation. Their discussion threads talk about using other platforms to discriminate against LGBTQ+ communities and individuals to circumvent Steam’s TOS policies. This type of behavior promotes discrimination, review brigading, and toxicity. It is surprising Steam is tolerating such open homophobia on this platform.
Oh no, bro! Hypnospace Outlaw portrays a version of the Internet in 1999 that is more diverse and inclusive than it actually was?? Oh no!
I remember the Internet of 1999. It was full of awesome weirdos. Everyone thought it was great that awesome weirdos had a place to say what they want to say.
If anything, in some senses, the Internet of 1999 was far more diverse and inclusive than the Internet of today.
The funny thing about that is that what makes Hypnospace Outlaw so good is that the era of the internet it portrays was exactly that diverse and inclusive! Yes, there were both women and PoC creating stuff on it long before there were chuds going around calling everything woke. And, you still spend a good portion of that game moderating flame wars between two teenage boys over their made-up girlfriends. So I don’t know where he’s getting an idea that the game is anything but a realistic depiction of that era. Maybe if his awareness of Internet culture only began in the 2010s.
They think old internet was iDubbz types screaming the n-word, racist and homophobic jokes in flash games, and 4chan. One of these chuds were even angry at me when I told them forums had usernames and 4chan was kind of looked down by others for its algorithm rewarding rage baits and similar stuff.
I’d be angry if you told me 4chan had an “algorithm” too… It had a raw ass bump order and that’s it (does that reward rage bait? Kinda yeah but so does any activity metric). Algorithms design to guess what posts you want to see are the worst part of modern social media which refuses to just show you all of a user or group’s posts in order.
It was way more primitive, but post that got more engagement often were on top. This lead to users trying to bait each other for more comments, thus some fame, all without any name.