I don't understand why a video game forum is the appropriate place to discuss politics in the first place. The topic is far too toxic and an assassination attempt points to the topic getting worse before it gets better. We've all got alternate places and avenues to discuss.
What possible good for GAF can come from the discussion?
I don't think that's true though.
Facebook is pure cancer; I deleted my account years ago.
Reddit is extreme left; impossible to have any reasonable discourse. I even tried r/NeutralNews and it is hilariously nowhere close to neutral.
Twitter is infested with bots and disinformation. Tweets are a megaphone and not a functional way to have a conversation.
Maybe I'm a sad jaded Millennial but I honestly don't have another digital forum I trust to discuss this. Yes - I've talked about it at the dinner table with my family - but they are my family. I likely have the same biases as them and don't even know it. And there's no way in HELL I'm going within 400 feet of this topic at work. Career suicide speedrun.
Internet 1.0 BBforums are literally perfect for this type of long-form discussion. Having a forum with reasonable centrist moderation like NeoGAF allows people who lack non-toxic forums to discuss and challenge and learn about major world events like this. And it also serves as an amazing information aggregator where people can add real-time news as it is discovered.
For example - I remember the Dark Knight theatre shooting back in 2012. I happened to be browsing GAF when the thread was started because someone's local Twitter picked up a shooting at a theatre. I learned about it through GAF at least a half hour before any mainstream news source picked it up. That was the power of Old GAF. Anonymous people in a community, sure, but we all value our digital avatars in this community enough not to post outright disinformation intentionally like Twitter.
