• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Drama at Kotaku

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
So Jason Scheier is upset at the capitalism of his own parent company for greed and silencing political speech in their articles but not at Blizzard for the same fucking thing with a non apology, keeping people fired, and then distraction.

He. Is. A. Fraud. Wow... a lot of so called progressives are really showing their asses right now.
He learned his lesson with Bethesda and UBI blacklisting Kotaku, so he treads lightly going forward. He knows if he did an anti-Activision article, the execs would boot his ass so far out the door, it would land dead centre into that huge pile of unsold books hes been pitching on Twitter for years.

As for all the Kotaku people hiding behind a vague Twitter post badmouthing the CEO in name, they are all begging to be fired. It's a blessing in disguise because given the situation the parent company can probably fire them for cause and if they hold firm, not even have to pay out severance. When you fuck up ad deals and publicly criticize the CEO making this into laughable video game forum banter, it's enough to gas them with out a payout IMO.

The only time you really get employees angry enough to call out the CEO is when there's big union negotiations going on or something weird like a CEO is doing sexual misconduct or it's a culture of harrassment.

I've never seen such a petty situation where employees (mostly video game freelancers to boot. lol) are so mad at something like ad revenue stuff on a website, they call out the CEO.

Supposedly the two key reasons for the bickering are:

1. Execs hated the trend of too much politics instead of quirky sports articles
2. Employees hated that the execs had to infiltrate articles with gobs of extra ads placements

And this lead to employee posting about it, and management deleting a post or something, which angered the employees more.

Understandable that employees don't like their post getting bombarded with ad clicks shit, and understandable execs don't like their sports focus site trending to politics.

BUT, execs are in charge. And you got to follow rules and man up for sake of revenue. That's what pays the bills, and allows all these work-from-home freelancers to get paid their $100 for every clickbait article they churn out every day. Be lucky this kind of job is even around and can earn money.
 
Last edited:

Nydius

Member
Watching the writer/editor reactions to management has been a riot. All of this started over the advertisements issue. Tensions were high and then management gave Deadspin the "stick to sports" mandate which sent them over the edge. Quitting, attacking the CEO publicly, trashing the company on Twitter, shitposting on the way out the door (Deadspin), and the ones who didn't have the balls to quit are using their own company platform to take shots at management (Kotaku).

All their behavior accomplishes is ensuring even more advertisers leave their platforms. And then what? More anger between management and staff, more bickering, more infighting. Sure, they might "win" the fight against their management that way but any journalist worth a damn would understand a Pyrrhic victory is hardly a victory at all.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Sure, they might "win" the fight against their management that way but any journalist worth a damn would understand a Pyrrhic victory is hardly a victory at all.
It would be amazing if Deadspin got shut down, and then the ex-employees claim "they won".

IMO, the biggest problems with media (especially gaming) are these:

1. Strong shill ties to ad revenue and support from game makers

2. Requires clickbait title threads and content for hits

3. Loose cannon culture. There is no way any of the media companies and websites have the same amount of code of ethics, code of conduct and mandatory meetings with HR like any corporation I've work at. Things like proper culture, work, anti-harassment (internal and external), what to do and not do on social media, and shady things like avoiding bribery, biased content and deals and shit like that.

It's like 90% of these game writers work from home as wild west freelancers saying stupid shit and hope it sticks, and then they collect their piecework pay stub. No respect considered like usual people working at an office or factory and there's tons of other employees to see, interact with, and the execs and directors walk around. Even if your jobs doesn't interact with execs, there's still an amount of respect as you all work in the same building.

I get a feeling all these freelancer kind of writers don't give a shit, and just wing it.

I don't even work in journalism, medicine, engineering or any of these fields that are supposed to require some kind of ethics in workmanship, yet even my company has these mandatory actions we have to do every year. And our office is simply a sales and marketing office.
 
Last edited:

Kagoshima_Luke

Gold Member
Creative director lol



source.gif
 

Jezbollah

Member
If I am management I'm happy I don't have to pay a single penny of severence and get the ability to hire whoever they want to produce the content they want for their website.

Them saying the site is dead just confirms that they thought the brand was "theirs".
 
H

hariseldon

Unconfirmed Member
If I am management I'm happy I don't have to pay a single penny of severence and get the ability to hire whoever they want to produce the content they want for their website.

Them saying the site is dead just confirms that they thought the brand was "theirs".

I'll laugh my cock off if the new site ends up being vastly more popular and no longer requires shitty adverts to make a profit ;)
 

#Phonepunk#

Banned
So Jason Scheier is upset at the capitalism of his own parent company
yes, imagine being against capitalism while also devoting all of your working life to promoting media products, with an overwhelming emphasis on those coming from giant corporations.

guy is a bullshit climber like the rest of them.
Yay! The journalists won!
as dumb as i find all this, i have to respect them sticking by their supposed values. is there a way we can start a petition to get Kotaku writers to also quit? after all they are supporting capitalism just by doing their jobs. every time they promote a Bethesda product they are helping make Donald Trump's brother Robert S. Trump more and more money. he is on the board:


so clearly they need to step up and DO SOMETHING. i mean unless sports writers have more integrity than games journalists...
 
Last edited:
Yay! The journalists won!

They do realize that aside from the short term PR black eye, the parent company is getting their way, right? They will hire a new crop for less pay that will play ball. Also not many new employers are going to be down with a candidate that has been on record airing out dirty laundry. So.... yay?

Edit: I do respect they stuck to their guns. Though, the premise of their central argument is juvenile considering their publication was a sports mag and they didn't want sports to be the focus.
 
Last edited:

Cato

Banned
And now they have hired new staff and are back in business. So they achieved nothing.

It is every companys wet dream to have all troublemakers resign with no severance and be able to replace them with
better employees.

ex-Deadspin writer at job interview: "And then when I didn't want to do my job as asked I very publicly went to war against my employer and CEO on twitter, slagging them without restraint". "If you hire me, I will not hesitate to drag you through the mud on twitter if you make me angry."
 

Petrae

Member
And now they have hired new staff and are back in business. So they achieved nothing.

It is every companys wet dream to have all troublemakers resign with no severance and be able to replace them with
better employees.

ex-Deadspin writer at job interview: "And then when I didn't want to do my job as asked I very publicly went to war against my employer and CEO on twitter, slagging them without restraint". "If you hire me, I will not hesitate to drag you through the mud on twitter if you make me angry."

I’m not sure what moron in HR would want to hire any employee with a proven record of defiance/insubordination. That’s just asking for trouble, which isn’t necessary. Even jobs like food service and retail shouldn’t bother with these slacktivists. Why risk the reputation of your business when it’s only a matter of time before these people turn on you too start trouble?

Let ‘em start e-begging and see how that works out.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
And now they have hired new staff and are back in business. So they achieved nothing.

It is every companys wet dream to have all troublemakers resign with no severance and be able to replace them with
better employees.

ex-Deadspin writer at job interview: "And then when I didn't want to do my job as asked I very publicly went to war against my employer and CEO on twitter, slagging them without restraint". "If you hire me, I will not hesitate to drag you through the mud on twitter if you make me angry."
I’m not sure what moron in HR would want to hire any employee with a proven record of defiance/insubordination. That’s just asking for trouble, which isn’t necessary. Even jobs like food service and retail shouldn’t bother with these slacktivists. Why risk the reputation of your business when it’s only a matter of time before these people turn on you too start trouble?

Let ‘em start e-begging and see how that works out.
That's internet media for ya. Always on the prowl for getting everything off your chest........... through twitter.

Personally, I think most of them got pink slipped, but for sake of putting up a brave face they all said they quit.

Never the less, fired or quit, I don't get why it's that hard to just quit peacefully. If the place sucks, and execs are infiltrating your uploads with more ads, then quit. Hand in a resignation and leave in two weeks like everyone else does.

If I quit for greener pastures, I quit.

First of all I don't even have a twitter account, but even if I did, what am I going to do? Actually sit here on my last day of work and tweet that the company sucks, the CEO sucks (in name too), and cry myself into a soggy bedtime pillow?

No.

But guess that's what you get with twitter lovers, and sports tabloid writers. lol. These guys are acting like they are all Steven Spielbergs getting shafted by the CEO of Columbia Pictures over a $50,000,000 royalty check or something. lol
 

TYRiAX

Member
If not for this thread I would not have even noticed Kotaku was offline... Hopefully this shows them that not as many people care about their woke agenda as they thought (unlikely i know)
 

Hudo

Member
  • Like
Reactions: Isa

Scopa

The Tribe Has Spoken
If not for this thread I would not have even noticed Kotaku was offline... Hopefully this shows them that not as many people care about their woke agenda as they thought (unlikely i know)
I don’t think their website is offline. I wouldn’t know though because I don’t go there.

Is that what you meant?
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Looks like Deadspin is running fine. A slew of posts by vague "Deadspin" authors, as well as some freelancers who show their name. Looks like the site didn't miss a beat.
 
Last edited:

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Bot writers have been around for at least 10 years from what I remember.

As the Forbes article even says, business articles use them. No doubt. Of course, it's canned articles which you can tell a program took financial data and generated the same template kind of data as every other article.

It's funny that these companies use bot writers or bot trend hunters to help their so called journalists focus on material. If the human brain needs a bunch of 0s and 1s to help craft an article, it goes to show journalism isn't as tough as they make it seem.

Unless the writing AI is so good, we all can't tell, I don't believe a self-automated writing cpu can make truly clickbaity sarcastic posts like a human. But you never know. And given how trashy the media is, it's probably better for sanity and unbiased material to have a robot write objective information instead of clickbait writers always trying to spin an opinion into it, so they can get paid their nickel per click.
 
Last edited:

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
So what you're saying is that after they restaff, their sports articles...will be about sports and not fucking politics? Cause that sounds awesome!
The politics limit can't be that rigid. On the home page they have an article about Suzuki/MAGA.
 

Yoda

Member
If they quit they won't get severance. They need to be honest with themselves and acknowledge the digital media jobs market is pretty bad for content creators (I guess its already happened, but still incase anyone didn't follow the herd).
 

GreyHorace

Member
Related, but I came across one of Deadspin's Twitter antics on KiwiFarms. Apparently they wanted to prove that Ted Cruz didn't play basketball.

Cruz then trolled them in response with a picture of Duke player Grayson Allen, who bears a remarkable likeness to Cruz.

Needless to say, Deadspin's response was not graceful to say the least. It really shows the quality of writers they had when they couldn't even win a Twitter feud with Ted Cruz of all people.

1np2ozj90uby.png
 
Last edited:

Bodatan

Banned
Related, but I came across one of Deadspin's Twitter antics on KiwiFarms. Apparently they wanted to prove that Ted Cruz didn't play basketball.

Cruz then trolled them in response with a picture of Duke player Grayson Allen, who bears a remarkable likeness to Cruz.

Needless to say, Deadspin's response was not graceful to say the least. It really shows the quality of writers they had when they couldn't even win a Twitter feud with Ted Cruz of all people.

1np2ozj90uby.png
Lmao 😂😂
 
Top Bottom