Hi KiA. It's been a pretty awful 6 months for a lot of people. You've been called every name under the sun and that's not fair. I read KiA on a daily basis along with many other places (some of which are in absolute opposition, because hey that's what grownups do, read widely), you guys are not a harassment group (or if you are you are the worlds shittiest harassment group because you have successfully pushed no women out of the industry in half a year, that's a pretty dismal success rate). All that said however, there are things you can be doing better that will help you achieve your goals faster and give your opponents less ammunition to work with. This has been discussed before but it's still relevant, particularly right now. The last few days in particular I've seen some problems and they're being exploited by those you oppose.
1) E-celeb bullshit, it's either gotta stop or be contained. That includes stuff about me. Why is a snarky tweet about Gawker on the frontpage? Why is everything I say a thread? I'm barely even involved in any of this, my sole interest from the start which is publicly documented and beyond reproach as far as I'm concerned, were the ethical concerns brought up by the original accusations against Nathan Grayson, then the subsequent censorship and unified narrative of the games press. In that respect I'm with you all the way, if you wanna talk ethics, you wanna improve games media? Great, 100% behind you. Problem is you've fallen into the trap of "fighting the enemy". You've focused on people and that's a battle you can't win. Why? Because a few of these people WANT you to talk about them. They thrive on it. Why do you think Wus game was greenlit so fast? Because she successfully peddled a narrative that Gamergate was attacking her and she NEEDED support to fight them. People bought it hook line and sinker, they even accepted the flagrantly false claims that "Not interested" votes have any effect on the Greenlight process. The more you talked about her the more she benefited.
Lemme ask you this. Is Wu in any way relevant to ethics in games media? No? Then stop talking about her. She is setup in such a way as to benefit from it. If she's harassed, she received media coverage, Patreon donations, Greenlight votes and more followers. Same applies to Sarkeesian, Quinn and also some bad actors that have jumped on this whole thing for publicity or some twisted sense of self-gratification. Do not feed into their narrative. Sarkeesian is only relevant to games media ethics when games media decides to parrot what she says without having the spine to stop and critique it. Quinn is only relevant to ethical concerns due to the conflict of interest with Grayson. These people should be left alone (not least because frankly as much as I disagree with all of them, they've been through enough shit as it is). It is slowing you down, it's making you REALLY hard to talk about to other people and everytime you engage in e-celeb drama, that's another thing that people can point to and say "AHHA! SEE, I knew it wasn't about ethics, you just want to talk about these women!". Stop talking about these women and stop talking about me. If I post a piece on ethics, sure, maybe that's relevant to you, but what I say daily on Twitter is not and certainly not the harassment I receive. That ship has sailed, everyone is ignoring the harassment from the "other side" and that's not going to change because all in all, the people you are fighting on a daily basis are zealous extremists who will tolerant no dissent from their dogma.
2) Be patient. The desire to find another smoking gun is understandable. The problem is everytime you jump on some half-cocked story that isn't well sourced and blow it up, it has a big chance of blowing up in your face. The Pinsof thing is worth investigating but the evidence is threadbare at best, there's a lot of "he said she said" and not a great deal of proof. Your time is better spent trying to find that proof rather than blowing up a story across Twitter that might turn out to be false and results in yet another set back for you guys.
3) Ghazi. Is not relevant. It is tiny, it's full of silly people that can't keep their stories straight. It's the place my wife goes to get a good laugh in the morning and see what crazy thing they've come up with next to try and ignore that she's a person. At the same time my wife has 50x the subscribers they do alone. They are a non-entity. You're always going to have groups like that. There are forums and websites dedicated to hating me. Have they achieved anything? Of course not. Will Ghazi? No. They feed off of you, they're a parasite as all of these SRS-lite groups are, they exist solely to hate. Render the hate impotent by ignoring them. We don't care what Ghazi did, they're a laughing stock.
4) Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. This is the optimum way to discuss relevant issues and not give ammunition to bad actors. Do not engage in ad hominem, do not even talk about people, talk about ideas. Only bring up people when it's absolutely relevant to an ethics concern (ie. this journalist/site did this). Want to argue against something Sarkeesian said? Post the idea then debunk it (or I mean just dont post about it at all because it has very little if anything to do with ethics in games media). These threads always devolve into bashing the person and ad hominems are a weak argumentative technique and are being used against you as proof that you are a bunch of harassers. This is what I hear from people I speak to in games dev and games media when I speak on your behalf. They go to KiA, they see that and they find it hard to give you the benefit of the doubt. Resist the urge to attack a person, attack their ideas. Without their ideas they lose their relevancy.
5) If you havent already, get a unified, sourced list of achievements and use it at every possible opportunity. I've been following KiA daily for over 6 months (as well as many other related sites and articles, I read all the bad stuff as well as the good), I can recite for the most part the things you've achieved but so many people cannot. It's gotta be public, it's gotta be front and center, it's gotta be beyond argument. Hell it should be permanently stickied at the top of this sub so people don't forget why they are here.
6) Please resist the urge to label. This ties into #4. In the same way that Gamergate is a boogieman for many people, so too is "SJW" for a lot of you. SJW isn't a real thing. There are ideologies at play and ideologies are compromised of a structure of ideas. Ideas can be criticized and they should be, it's part of healthy human development. It's best not to make assumptions about people. Nobody is the same and it makes it much easier to in turn lump you guys into a harmful label if you keep using them yourselves. What relevance is the term SJW? There doesn't appear to be one. You dont need shorthand on Reddit. Talk about ideas.
You might view this as tone policing. Feel free to disregard everything I've said. But you don't win by mud-wrestling a pig, you just end up dirty and the pig likes it. Remove emotion from the equation by removing people from the equation and focusing on ideas that can be proven or disproven. "This is an ethical violation, here is my proof", that's good. "Look at what Wu did this time", this is bad. It's not even about treating people with respect though you should regardless, it's about being an effective movement for positive change. If you can't be that then well, the detractors will end up being proved right and that's what history will say. Don't fall into the traps of tit for tat distraction. The more time you spend engaging with people who have no real relevance to games media or indeed the wider ethical problems this industry has which I hope you will move onto next at some point, the worse it will get. Don't go backwards.
Anyway for the most part you are doing good work, you just keep falling into traps and taking bait. Get better at avoiding that and you'll be more productive (and stop posting my bloody twitter as news).
Thanks