It followed in SGDQ, where people would comment on a female runner's legs or talk about the cute-voiced donation reader and try and find her twitter.
Maybe I'm just getting older and don't remember that I was such a slave to physical observations of people that I had to tell the world every time I found someone attractive in my early 20s, but jesus is it tough to read some threads sometimes.
Yes, that shit is disgusting. I wanted to give the chat a chance this year, but I eventually realized that twitch chat is going to be the way it is forever, and no one will put their foot down about it. I dunno, when I was in
high school and my first year of undergrad, that type of garbage would be more prevalent, but not now. I'm in my mid-20s, and guys I know have gotten further past publicly drooling over every single woman (real or fictional) whom they find attractive (and same goes with women or trans I know declaring their interest in someone). It makes sense to express that you find a woman or man attractive, but it's usually done in a more tasteful and casual way as opposed to dwelling on it or spending excessive time on it as though you were a high schooler.
I suppose this also has to do with GAF's demographics as well, but even then, I'd expect folks to read the TOS, adhere to the rules in the FAQ forum, realize that when mods put their foot down in one or a few threads, that maybe it's not quite a good idea to carry on your behaviour in other threads. Reading through the Treehouse thread expecting news on updates but being met with post after post about every single woman on the Treehouse segment was disappointing. It's something I expect from the Twitch chat. Not from GAF. It was pretty frustrating to read through, and in the end I ditched reading through the thread (which something I don't usually do because I do try to read every post if I have time).
Now then, when Criminal Girls was announced for localization, I wanted to check in on GAF for news for the NISA panel (as I was currently signed out and haven't checked GAF in a long time). I'm in a public area on my phone, and I made a(n in hindsight) stupid decision to click on the Criminal Girls thread. What greeted me were images that I was not comfortable viewing in public. I can certainly be put at fault because I knew of the game's nature given the fact that I've read Japanese reviews for it, though at the same time, the thread was an announcement thread and not labeled NSFW. When it was an icecream thread or another person's thread (whose name escapes me, but Lin was referring to that person earlier in this thread), I knew not to click on it in public, and generally I wasn't interested in the types of games they posted about.
The thing about the Criminal Girls thread was, as I was peeking in, the discussion did not boil down to the game's content, but rather as Charlequin put it, the discussion centered on the same song and dance that this thread was going through in its beginning few pages. I read through entire threads, and the Criminal Girls thread became somewhat creepy fairly quickly. Some of this discussion may lead to content that is completely inappropriate or violates/skirts the TOS in some fashion. I have corresponded with a few lurkers and former GAF members, and while the thread in question did not grab their attention, other games' announcement threads with semi-similar content did. And this is actually unwanted attention because typically the threads are described as "trainwrecks that you can't stop watching". Obviously they don't reflect very well on the community, especially with respect to keeping up respectable discourse. A lot of people tell me that this site now has a tendency to bicker constantly and use low blows more often than not to do it, or some arguments tend to be so closed-minded or sheltered enough that one side doesn't respectfully take into account what the other side wants to say. It's like a "I'm right, you're wrong, there's nothing you can say about it and that's that" sort of affair, and this sort of mentality isn't exclusive to these types of threads being discussed. But it was most commonly seen in the Criminal Girls announcement thread.
I don't see many of the mods desiring to try to chose whether or not they should crack down or try to mediate between people. In fact, they may not know as much about the game because it's not something that interests them. At this point, it becomes difficult to moderate these threads because the moderator wouldn't have much context behind posts or even the posts' relevancy to the threads.
Eh, I just wanted to get my two cents in since someone told me about this thread. At least it's still open as an avenue of discussion. My personal concern is that a lot of the threads that I had loved to frequent during my heavier posting years have degenerated into waifu wars, posting fanart or stupid user-created fanfiction in a mocking fashion (sometimes in an effort to obtain a tag for infamy), lengthy and possibly unnecessary discussions about "canon/noncanon" or character design, etc. It's become less about discussing the video game, and more about discussing the politics surrounding the video game. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there comes a time when people want to discuss the game itself as opposed to the politics that surround the game. But that's another discussion for another day. I've had my own misgivings and issues about GAF for quite a while, and this thread has certainly highlighted some of them by proxy. At least some of these concerns are being aired out.
I don't think this is about censorship or restricting, but more about common sense: one thing may lead to another which may skirt the TOS or violate it, and that may not be desirable to people playing the game and wanting to discuss the actual game content. So it's either you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. It's a decision I don't envy one bit.
