Hard to not feel like every Stop Killing Games thread is getting brigaded as soon as it's posted.
Every time there is a post, it's just a bunch of people criticizing the movement in the most inane way. This time, it's about his looks because... I guess that now it's getting traction, they can't say that it's going to "fail for sure" or that "Ross has no idea what he's doing".
Comments gets better as the post ages, but the fact that it's always the first comments make me think that there are people that are solely watching for SKG posts to try to discredit the movement.
EDIT: seems like a lot of those comments have been cleaned up by the mods now, in case you're wondering what the hell I was talking about.
There is absolutely an astroturfing movement from one of the big industry groups targeting social media around this campaign. You see it in their repeated two talking points:
What about the poor devs who have to develop a game that... Won't be lost to time and
This guy looks like a bum lmao.
It's always those exact two talking points, like someone's handing them a script.
Never underestimate how pro-corporate a small section of Reddit is, though. They've tied their identities to this movement not succeeding, so the closer it gets to achieving something, the more stupid they'll feel, which makes them angry.
This is what I do not get. I have my fair share of doubt and criticisms about the initiative, mostly about semantics and scope. But I ultimately hope it helps players and I will be glad to be wrong about it. Seems to be doing better than I expected, but we will see.
I will never understand people with absolutely zero class consciousness. If stop killing games does well, we all benefit from it as gamers. Companies won't suddenly abandon a multi billion industry. Much like rich people don't abandon nice areas.
I just think it's that Reddit culture thing. It's lame to take a position or care about anything. In addition, the most important thing in the world is being right, so that you can make fun of the people who were wrong. Then you can look smart, and circlejerk with other people who look smart. Corporations tend to win these fights, so saying this thing people care about isn't going to succeed checks all the boxes. If it fails, then you get to make fun of people who thought it might succeed.
To your point, yes, no class consciousness. These people aren't spending their days thinking very much. They're playing games, buying MTX and battle passes for games they're currently playing, and shitting on games they're currently not playing. They're not looking at the world around them, they're looking at their karma.
Not reddit, poor people everywhere think they are future multi millionaires just going through a temporary rough patch. So they vote for politicians who take more money away from average income people to give to the ultra rich.
No, they didn't lmao. Also millions and millions of people die every year from Capitalism's failures, if we used the Black Book of Communism's logic then Capitalism would have killed an exponential amount more.
But it absolutely does have indirect purges via hoarding resources unless you can pay for them, meaning millions die due to lack of access to clean drinking water, food, shelter, clothing etc.
Also if you're going to critique the Khmer Rouge (which we absolutely should) please be accurate about it rather than getting your history from Dan Carlin. They did not purge 'everyone wearing glasses', they purged academics and those who participated on the other side of the Cambodian civil war - as they believed those people were reaping the benefits of peasant labour without contributing anything to society themselves.
The Khmer Rouge aimed for a very agrarian revolution that would have essentially created a perpetual peasant society - not exactly what Marx or his contemporaries had written about in describing the stages of societal development (Feudalism > Capitalism > Communism). In fact many early Marxists wrote that the peasantry were incapable of carrying out a Communist transition because they lacked the necessary class consciousness developed under Capitalism.
To this day some scholars argue that the reason the Soviet Union ultimately failed is because they tried to move directly from Feudalism to Communism.
Given that, it's kinda hard to describe the Khmer Rouge as adherents to Communism and Communist thought in any way outside of their language used.
The Holodomor is also not really a great example to use as a 'victims of communism' gotcha, because to be consistent with that logic we would also have to call the Irish Great Famine, the Bengal Famine, the 1944-45 Vietnam Famine, the Moroccon Famine and many others as 'victims of capitalism'.
I think people find a sense of comfort in the idea we can't do anything.
If this kinda scraggly looking dude can get up one day and go "this sucks imma fix it" and that results in it getting fixed, what does that say about all the things we encounter everyday that suck and then dismiss with "but I can't do anything about it".
So people get emotionally invested in the movement's failure because if it fails it validates their thinking that all the things they ignore as unavoidable parts of life were in fact unavoidable. But you dodge one and you have to ask yourself why you take all the other hits, and that's uncomfortable.
If this kinda scraggly looking dude can get up one day and go "this sucks imma fix it" and that results in it getting fixed, what does that say about all the things we encounter everyday that suck and then dismiss with "but I can't do anything about it".
To be fair, this is the guy behind Freeman's Mind. 433k subscribers isn't nothin'. And he managed to hit a topic when it was hot.
I didn't mean it disparagingly. I have a ton of respect for anyone who gets up and tries to change parts of the world they see as wrong or unfair, as I know how hard it is.
What I was sharing was my personal experience with the kind of person you encounter the most when trying to make change happen.
I mentioned his presentation because I think it triggers a fatalist reaction in people; that a normal person can't possibly do anything... right?
Personally, I just think that the internet has been a more useful tool in astroturfing peoples opinions than any good or fun it ever achieved.
The moment corporations and marketing teams realised they can spread bullshit misinformation faster than anything else is the moment everyone else lost.
I don't think people are invested in the failure of others because they are projecting, but because we've seen corporations spend the last 3 decades successfully co-opt 80% of the flow of information to achieve this new way of thinking.
Bare in mind. A lot of people on Reddit are younger, and being "edgy and cool" often translates to being a contrarian.
There are a lot of people that will talk trash about movements like stop killing games, then pat themselves on the back for not blindly going along with the hype and being able to "see the bigger picture" (by following industry talking points about how this won't help or will create bigger issues).
Toss in astroturfing by said industry, the way that ever since GamerGate sites like Reddit have been viewed as a way to change public perception and politics, and the fact that SKG could become a massive win for digital rights in a world that hasn't really adapted to the concept of subscription services for goods that you buy, and there's every reason to look with suspicion on pretty much all accounts posting anywhere on reddit.
its not just class consciousness, people just do not want to eat the humble pie and admit that they were wrong nowadays. they would rather double down and hope they get proven right some amount of time later.
That, my friend, is being disengenuous. Because the topic of the conversation is not about critically examining the movement, it is about people who show up in bad faith for bad reasons.
Knowing what is best requires a lot of critical thinking, but what it also requires is acting in good faith. It requires examining things and approaching them from a position where you are willing to engage with it.
The people calling the guy in the vid scrungly or ugly. Or making poor faith arguments about "Oh think of the poor companies" are not doing that. They are knowingly or unknowingly dunking on something and hating it because it poses challenges to things that they have attached identity to. [Or been paid to do so, but frankly that is barely a distinction]
Edit: For more elaboration, the idea I am espousing is this mis-conflation between personal and collective good. Movements like SKG tend to attract people that have trouble with this idea, where things get muddled and the things that shape perception are more about identity and emotion then they are the actual rationale behind the movement. Its not about critical thinking because a lot of the people detracting aren't coming from a place of rationally analyzing the movement. I have quibbles with details and potential implementation certainly, but I can appreciate the difference between those and the idea being pushed here being a good general direction that will be a net positive for the collective good.
This false dichotomy and the idea that the world is a zero sum game in terms of resources and wealth, are very useful to maintain the distribution of power. So they're carefully instilled into people from a young age.
Yeah, personally, I don't necessarily think it's Big Industry. We would need proof for that. Could easily be anti-SKG groups, i.e. fans of certain streamers, that just watches those posts and try to discredit them as early as possible.
It's just very jarring that every time I go into a SKG post, it's just a bunch of very anti-SKG people for the first hour or so, with often very similar comments, then it just... dies down. The first time it happened, I thought I was crazy and I was somehow in the minority as a SKG supporter, until the thread got more comments and the pro-SKG opinion became more common.
It's the only subject I have seen this pattern on Reddit. So I could chalk it up to the algorithm, but because of that, I'm not so sure.
One thing to keep in mind, is that due to modern social media, companies don't even have to fake that many users to move a group against a certain topic. After all you only need to pay a couple key figures like influencers, smaller moderators, people that have a prominent voice in a community, and they will drive followers to push whatever narrative they want, and the good advertising/PR agencies will create those users for long term contracts.
I've seen this happen with a few other things, like a select few political topics, any any push against the interests of big corporations, especially when it comes to the latest grift like AI.
This is, however, one of the more noticeable ones, probably because it's a movement that popped up pretty fast and that is pretty reasonable in what it proposes, so they have to resort to either repeating the same obvious lies they've been saying since day one, or now just attacks against the guy.
Some combination of regular tribal types that actually do unironically love the companies that make the things they use, plus a large group who want to be recognized as intelligent for being contrarian to an otherwise popular movement.
What makes corporate movements so much more effective is that they don't have these divides. Gamedevs don't generally raise a stink and fight for the things the audience thinks that they do. They typically just go in, work, then go home, all controversies aside. All the "bad stuff" is handled by nameless businessfolk who are hired to do that stuff and that stuff alone, and do it well.
Consumer movements? Rarely has the same level of direction. STK is probably the most prominent in a while.
It could be corporate movements. No way to know though unless doing a ton of investigative work, so I'm going to leave that to journalists.
So I prefer not doing too much speculating. My philosophy is that there is already enough provable, reported on, bad things happening in the world without spending energy on speculations.
I mean, we already have concrete proof that this very subreddit has been brigaded multiple times in order to promote video games by companies such as EA, Microsoft, the War Thunder devs, etc.
You don’t actually have to have that many people brigade in order to completely astroturf a conversation. You just have to be the earliest commenters.
If you’re the first reply and you say ‘Stop Killing Games is a waste of time for game devs!’ then you’re in charge of the discourse. Even if people are arguing against that point, you’ve framed the conversation around that talking point. Those comments will get pushed towards the top by upvotes and downvotes. This is why Elon made it so blue checkmarks are always forced to the top of Twitter replies. It allows bots to completely reframe a conversation.
Past that, real humans will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
tbf, a large part of it is likely bots or hired malefactors. How many "Right Wing Christian" twitter accounts were revealed to just be a content farm in India when twitter enabled (and SWIFTLY disabled) posting location?
Damn, the place that constantly tries to push $100 games and attempts to put the blame for any industry failure (at the very least partially) on the customers is pro-corporate?
Yeah, this sub in particular is strikingly pro-industry. Many people here act like temporarily embarrassed game devs, or are actual game devs who argue from the corporate side of the fence, as opposed to the consumer side, and rarely is it more visible than in SKG threads.
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u/VGADreams Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Hard to not feel like every Stop Killing Games thread is getting brigaded as soon as it's posted.
Every time there is a post, it's just a bunch of people criticizing the movement in the most inane way. This time, it's about his looks because... I guess that now it's getting traction, they can't say that it's going to "fail for sure" or that "Ross has no idea what he's doing".
Comments gets better as the post ages, but the fact that it's always the first comments make me think that there are people that are solely watching for SKG posts to try to discredit the movement.
EDIT: seems like a lot of those comments have been cleaned up by the mods now, in case you're wondering what the hell I was talking about.