Quote Originally Posted by The Extinguisher View Post
If youre choosing to ignore the actual harm that has been done by harassment mobs via twitter then i have no idea what to tell you.
The block button exists for a reason. As does physically stepping away from the internet. If mean comments on the internet, even a lot of them all at once, can endanger your health, then you should probably not be on the internet.

I get death threats online on occasion. I usually laugh it off. Sometimes I'll block the person, other times I won't bother.

TB was a prominent figure in gamergate, a harassment campaign aimed at women in gaming, specifically game development and journalism. And while he never participated in the harassment himself (to my knowledge at least) he certainly pointed his following who was doing the harassment at people he disagreed with
When GG started, it was an attempt to reign in some of the excesses of the game journalist clique, where they would promote the games of their friends without disclosure. IGN had been a joke for years, and Polygon and Kotaku had swung hard into that territory as well. Almost nobody who was super into gaming used game reviews from the big websites as anything except bias confirmation.

All that GG wanted was for the journalists to adhere to the SPJ Code of Ethics. This is especially important for hobbyist press, where there is an increased likelihood that the journalist has friends on the dev team or access they don't want to lose. Gamergate could've started and ended in 72 hours if they had come out and said "We will do that in the future, here is our updated ethics and disclosure policy." That is what TotalBiscuit fought for, and he followed that code in all of his review videos.

As far as TB himself, I may not have liked his content or him personally, but I respected him. That man was arguably part of what brought PC gaming out of the dark age of "Yet another bad console port" and into the golden age that we have in the PC market today. His videos made many an indie dev a success, because if TB recommended a game, it was a good game. He was a trailblazer, being the first video game reviewer on Youtube to really make it big, and he did it without the help of an established network.