![]() You don’t even have to like them to realize this. The forum undoubtedly has its toxic side, but it’s neither 100 percent male nor devoid of positive, healthy camaraderie built around lifting one another up. Gamergate had no coherent objective besides the coordinated abuse of women on the bullshit pretext of “ethics in video games journalism,” whereas the Reddit stock traders have something to gain beyond the punishment of the financial sector: They are apparently donating profits to charity, paying off student loans, covering family medical bills and expensive veterinary surgeries. We can acknowledge what’s disturbing in the WSB saga - bigoted language and jokes on the subreddit, alleged threats against and hacking of prominent Wall Street figures and their families - without suggesting it’s the result of sexist resentment, or purely vindictive. This is lazy conflation at best and stereotyping at worst, a knee-jerk response that casts any group of internet troublemakers as violently misogynist neckbeards. ![]() Someone on NPR just compared the Reddit stock market stuff to gamergate bc of the "harassment" of hedge fund managers □įuck an unfuckable asshole or his bad behavior is your fault is not a new take but it’s decidedly worse when the unfuckables are the same guys who ran gamergate When faced with the story of Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets community squeezing hedge funds by investing in companies those firms had shorted, including the moribund retailer GameStop, not a few observers instinctively compared it to Gamergate, an appallingly vicious 2014-2015 harassment campaign against a number of women in the video game industry. The latter isn’t always done out of intent to deceive, but sometimes in an effort to set new and tumultuous happenings into a familiar pattern. Nonetheless, you can label the dominoes however you like, either for a laugh or, more unfortunately, to push a narrative that has the flimsiest of relationships to the truth. ![]() If the 2016 killing of Harambe, a Cincinnati Zoo gorilla, somehow triggered a viral outbreak that was first identified in China more than three years later, it would have to be in a way so abstract as to be unprovable. This is a shitposter’s callback, not an earnest attempt to connect two disparate events. Really small domino creates big cascade from MemeTemplatesOfficial Now, onto a less convincing sequence of cause and effect: Musk is profoundly annoying and often wrong (check out all the misinformation on the coronavirus he amplified!), but insofar as Facebook radicalized many who went on to be far-right terrorists, we can grant his point, mostly as he stole it from someone else. Here we see epic internet humor bro Elon Musk sharing a domino meme that casts blame for the deadly Capitol riot of January 6th on Facebook, which famously began with Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg’s idea for a web game where the user voted on the more attractive of two random people, with the photos scraped from a campus directory. This is called the domino effect /qpbEW54RvM The wild momentum of 2021 has us trying to draw that line, to grasp the chain of events that led us here.įor a visual metaphor, try this row of dominoes that grow exponentially in size. H istory races forward even while we are stuck in isolation. Time may be a flat circle, but it’s also an arrow. Yet the world, and particularly the virtual world that has been a retreat from the exterior one, seems to be accelerating. Living under pandemic restrictions, missing the usual milestones of birthdays, vacations, anniversary dinners and holiday gatherings has the feel of suspended animation. And that, folks, is how the universe validates someone's petty revenge.įor more stories like this, check out this post about a student's clever study guide.Time, as people like to observe, hits differently these days. Apparently, Sarah also happened to be the name of one of Laura's former employees, but as it turns out, this review unintentionally encouraged Sarah to speak out about her poor experiences as well. ![]() She created an alias ("Sarah") and gave the salon a savage one-star review online. Many years later, she discovered that Laura, the mean girl in question, started a beauty salon in the area. This thread was posted to Reddit's r/pettyrevenge subreddit by u/georgialucy, who opened up about how she got back at the mean girl who made her high school experience a difficult one. Usually when we're talking about this kind of domino effect, we're talking about larger issues that affect populations of people, but it can work on a small scale as well, especially when it comes to petty revenge. Sometimes it just takes one voice to create a wave.
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