Periodic reminder: 404 Media is the same Vice bros who broke their confidentiality agreement with Naomi Wu and outed her without her consent, putting her in danger to satisfy the prurient interests of the Gamergate crowd.
Don't be surprised when they run slopaganda pieces. These people are not our friends, even if they are doing some useful reporting too.
And the aftermath: when she retaliated to the Vice bros' life-endangering violation of her privacy with a far smaller violation of theirs, they reported her for "doxxing" and destroyed her main source of income, her Patreon.
I probably wouldn't still be bringing this up if they had ever apologized to her and tried to help make things right, or even if they'd just admitted publicly how badly they fucked up.
But the whole "look at us, we're the good guys!" act while never owning up to how badly they.. were not? That really really gives me bad vibes.
Oct 15, 2026, 5:26 PM@dalias you become big enough and the compromise becomes a matter of math.
the question is will you let the system dictate your trajectory, or forge your own?
seems like most people end up failing that test
@cyberquixote It's not that they became big and sold out.
They were behaving in highly unethical ways back when they worked for Vice like a decade ago, before they started their own thing.
They're just being who they were all along.
Oct 16, 2026, 12:52 PM@dalias @cyberquixote I never trusted Vice back in the day nor a lot of the so-called "alternative media", especially seeing the way they reported on subcultures here in Europe (often sensationalising them and attracting unwanted attention and subsequent clampdowns from authorities), and then the journos just moved on to the "next cool thing"
@dalias she was also an active member of a private discord server I moderated back then and effectively had to go offline entirely because of all of that. So many people underestimate the actual costs. It wasn't just her public image at stake.
@cararemixed @dalias yeah we came to believe it demonstrated a profound mismatch between the context of English-speaking activists and the situation for people of Chinese descent. it's on all of us to learn from it and do better next time.
Oct 16, 2026, 11:37 AM@dalias I thought it was Vice's editor-in-chief that Naomi Wu took issue with.
My impression of 404 media at their inception is that they were leaving an environment where they thought bad decisions were being made.
I would be interested in finding out who was actually responsible for disclosing Wu's private details.
@tasket Nope, the 404 bros are *exactly* the names I remember.
@dalias Being enshittified from the start, with the email requirement, has never inspired good faith. Evil correlates with evil in this world, it seems.
Oct 16, 2026, 5:14 AM@dalias
I had no idea. So thank you for the periodic reminder. I just read (skimmed) her three Medium posts.
Gross. Including the part Sarah Jeong played ... and Hasan Minhaj. Though, with Minhaj I'm willing to almost imagine his show might not have been aware they were putting her in jeopardy.
@dalias thanks for the reminder 💜
@dalias I had no idea. I'm going to cancel my subscription.
@dalias what piece are you referring to that is slopaganda ? And is it all of 404 you are referring to?
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/117446051034702354
@jat23 The slopaganda was this. And the founders of 404 were exactly the people directly involved in outing Naomi and taking away her income when they were at Vice.