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comment by Hyperseeker
Hyperseeker  ·  1361 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Soon we’ll all be cancelled

The Dota 2 community was recently shaken by a wave of accusations of sexual harassment towards a lot of male analysts/commentators/casters in the Western scene. If you go to /r/Dota2 and sort by "top of month", you're gonna see a lot of posts on the matter.

A handful of high-profile commentators have already left the scene: GranDGranT, RedEye, TobiWan... The scene is very small. The three of them leaving means there's a big personality vacuum.

At least one high-profile commentator was falsely accused: Zyori. It took some time to sort out what happened (the accuser went a little too hot on the ways to describe what had occurred), and now Zyori is back to casting matches.

Those three, though? Pummelled into the ground by the Internet army. Rightly so, it would appear: they were all accused on multiple accounts, from respectable sources, with independent confirmation by fellow commentators. There was still a lot of support for them, though. Some thought the loss of a prominent figure in the community justifies not doing anything about the accusations: as if the community itself would be damaged by the loss of these men.

I guess harassment of women on the scene – good casters in their own right, not some eye candy for the horny teens – would be a reasonable expectation for some.

I don't know much about cancel culture – the whole concept it still one I'm yet to read up on – but I've been watching the shitstorm of opinions and facts and defenses and counter-accusations... When the storm had settled, the genuinely-good people of the community stayed good (Slacks, Purge, PFlax, syndereN, SUNSFan...), and I hope the women who had to experience the bullshit got a little relief their way.

On those rare occasions that the Internet army acts against sexual predators, it feels good.