I still remember this priceless post:

Bruh, it's Neogaf. Neogaf is a hivemind and if you for one second don't agree with what they want you to believe you'll get banned.

I feel like one poster in this thread described it best when they said it basically became a "safe spot" for people who want to assert their specific views over there, so if anyone disagrees they all immediately pile up on that person and then that person gets banned because the mods want you to believe what they believe.

I'm still not quite sure what the whole Gamergate thing was about after all this time, but any thread of it i've seen on Neogaf if someone dare not immediately go with the flow and say "Fuck gamergate" but instead asks legitimate questions about it they are seen with a ban and get dogpilled on by plenty of other users, same thing with other topics over there. Neogaf in general is just a joke of a site, and several actual game developers have made fun of it.

I'm actually for curated moderation akin to what you see on VG Chartz. Completely unrestricted moderation leads to the likes of 4chan which is so filled with nonsense that it's practically impossible to have any real, sensible discussions.

The difference is that you can exist on this forum if you're not pro-Hillary, extremely liberal, and despise Gamergate.

I myself am a Republican, and when I was on NeoGAF I felt pressured into remaining silent. Occasionally I would express my beliefs and receive so much shock and blowback that I felt absolutely terrified about going into topics and providing them with a counterpoint argument.

Keep in mind, these are simple beliefs like "Anita Sarkeesian's videos are overly reductive and there are legitimate reasons to criticize them" or "I think EVERYONE should have lower taxes, not just poor people, because government should be smaller" or "I think we should preserve the 2nd Amendment, a ban on assault weapons does more harm than good." They are legitimate opinions which are civilly discussed in many other venues....but in NeoGAF they're de facto banned and subject to harsh moderation.

When you say something deviant on NeoGAF you are immediately put under a microscope, subject to an intense amount of scruntiny where one extremely minor slight can lead to a permaban (see the OP). Here and elsewhere, your actions have to be clearly juvenile to receive bans.

On NeoGAF I have seen a well-known African-American user make absolutely outrageous, clearly racist, anti-white comments, and yet will remain unbanned because "We want to maintain diversity in representation on this site, so we give them a free pass." I have literally seen a NeoGAF moderator say those words before.

@bolded: I'm pretty sure the only people that actually think this are those that have Neogaf accounts and the Neogaf mods, lol. 

Plenty of people and even developers themselves have talked about how much of a joke of a website it is. 

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Neogaf is a useful tool for getting info and they have a pretty good market place.

Going against the current there is a waste of time for sure.

Yeah, that's one of the examples I was thinking of when I wrote about how developers have said it's a horrible website, but I was too lazy to look the tweet up.

Thanks.

Yeah, it becomes a real problem if you try to drown out one side of a debate. That's one of the things we're proud of here. Anyone is free to talk about anything they want (to an extent of course, there's always limits), and if someone does have a left or right leaning opinion, they never get piled upon by the other side. On the other hand, our mod team isn't built up of people that hold the same beliefs and preferences about topics like that. There will always be a counter argument within modchat, so we're more than happy to let people share opinions and have good debate on subjects.

I like to think our rule set can be summed up in one simple phrase; "Don't be a dick".

That is golden!