Among other things, I think it suggests that my opinion about what happened, as someone who does know those things from distinctly remembering them and having had them be personally relevant at the time, should be taken more seriously than that of people telling me over a decade later what happened based on some combination of { the Wikipedia article, their own worldview, what their friends have said about it, more recent news articles from aggrieved people who cite it as part of a grand conspiracy theory about contemporary right-wing politics }.

If your grievance is "people don't take me seriously in arguments", then you could try deploying sources. There's probably still plenty of /v/ archives from back in the day, right?

But I think "people trust contemporary and retrospective reporting more than me, a guy who self-identifies as having a skin-in-the-game perspective" shouldn't be very surprising.

And, if it means anything, I was reading /v/ at the time, too, was initially sympathetic, and eventually realized it was all just an extension of existing /v/ grievance politics (from my perspective) - "people who disagree with us or make things we don't like are getting attention, which is evil".

I was there for threads where people were seething about positive coverage around Depression Quest before the "Zoe Post" blow-up, which was purely "we don't like that people enjoy experiences that don't suit our tastes".

At some point I realized that there just wasn't any actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about outlets liking things they didn't.