AFTER A 14-YEAR run, Gawker.com is shutting down next week. Gawker Media’s new owner, US Spanish-language TV network Univision, made the decision to shut down the site after bidding $135 million for the web publisher’s seven-site portfolio in a bankruptcy auction earlier this week. (A bankruptcy judge is set to approve the final sale later today.) Gawker’s outgoing CEO Nick Denton broke the news to staffers in Gawker’s Manhattan office today.

The end of Gawker is also the end of an era in the web’s short history. As one of the original online journalism upstarts, Gawker pushed editorial boundaries beyond the niceties of traditional mainstream journalism in a way that has come to define the tone and style of news on the web. At its worst, Gawker published articles with seemingly little news value, like its purported outing of a Condé Nast executive (Condé Nast is WIRED’s parent company). At its best, Gawker punched up with a vengeance, holding powerful public figures and institutions accountable. In the process, Gawker often angered those same powerful people, including two fateful posts that led to its undoing: one that identified billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel as gay, and another that excerpted a Hulk Hogan sex tape. Thiel secretly bankrolled Hogan’s invasion of privacy lawsuit against Gawker, and Hogan won in court. The $140 million judgment against Gawker eventually bankrupted the company, forcing it to sell its editorial assets. Now Gawker.com is no more.

Gawker writers will reportedly keep their jobs at one of Gawker Media’s six other sites, or at other properties owned by Univision. (The TV network also owns the tech-centric Fusion, the black news and culture site The Root, as well as a minority stake in The Onion.)

Wherever those writers land, Gawker’s shuttering is a sobering reality check not just for its own employees but journalists in general. Whether or not you agreed with its approach, Gawker’s willingness to push limits and stir controversy underscores the whole point of the First Amendment. “The biggest [downside] is losing the financial independence that let us write whatever we want without any fear of corporate overlords trying to quash us,” one Gawker Media writer told WIRED when the company declared bankruptcy. Now, it seems, those outside forces—with the help of a powerful tech tycoon—accomplished just that.

As someone who has been immersed in gaming and Internet culture for decades, I'm no stranger to how fans with enflamed passions can spew some heated and at times hateful rhetoric about their favorite properties online. Random Internet users can and do generate huge volumes of uncivil discussion, harassment, and sometimes even threats over everything from Mass Effect 3's ending to arguments over review scores.

Still, a portion of the reaction to news of the No Man's Sky delay in recent days seems fundamentally different in a way that has been troubling me.

The basic news being discussed here is pretty boring by game industry standards. No Man's Sky, which developer Hello Games has been targeting for a June 2016 release since last October, was first rumored and then confirmed to be delayed to early August over the past week.

This kind of short-term delay happens all the time in the game industry, but you wouldn't know it from the way some people apparently reacted online. "I have received loads of death threats this week," Hello Games' founder Sean Murray tweeted on Saturday. "But don't worry, Hello Games now looks like the house from Home Alone" (subsequent tweets suggested Murray was handling the threats with good humor, at least).

The extreme response extended to the mere reporting of the delay. Kotaku's Jason Schreier, who first wrote about the delay as a rumor, shared a message he received from a Twitter user threatening to "come by, say hi to you, and fuck you up... sounds like you have a death wish. We will find you. Be afraid human, we are coming for you." Elsewhere on the No Man's Sky subreddit, users did some questionable sleuthing to cast doubt on the report and whipped each other into a frothing ire over what turned out to be a reporter accurately reporting the news.

There's some risk in over-analyzing and inflating the importance of these kinds of random Internet responses. Nutpicking the proportionally small number of No Man's Sky fans that reacted to the delay with irrational levels of hatred risks making the entire community around the game look bad for no good reason. These threats are from a small subset of the small subset of people commenting on the game online, who are a small subset of those reading about the game online, who are a small subset of those who will eventually play the game.
Simply writing about these responses at all risks giving attention to many people who are likely trolls just looking to provoke a response. The people apologizing to and defending Kotaku and Hello Games certainly don't receive nearly as much attention.

And, as Bithell Games' Alexander Sliwinski points out on Twitter, this sort of thing isn't entirely new to the industry. "Why is getting death threats in games suddenly news?" he asks. "Are we just openly talking about it now? This has been going on for over a decade." Then again, if this is a common problem in game development circles, it's one that developers have largely been silent about publicly, likely for a variety of understandable reasons. That all suggests it's a problem we should be doing more to bring to light in the rare instances it does become public.

In any case, there's something about this specific overreaction from certain fans that has been unsettling me all weekend. Part of it is that No Man's Sky isn't the type of game you'd usually expect to attract this kind of frenzied reaction. Not to over generalize, but there tends to be a correlation between a game's level of macho, adrenaline-fueled violence and the amount of... let's politely say "heated debate" that it attracts online.

No Man's Sky has some shooty bits, but it's overwhelmingly a game about the wonder of exploring a near-infinite cosmos and the joy of discovering new flora and fauna generated by a wondrous generative algorithm. The fact that even this game can inspire this level of blind Internet rage is surprising to say the least. (The fact that No Man's Sky is launching on PS4 and PC but not Xbox One—and is thus invariably wrapped up in the Internet anger machine that is the never-ending console wars—could have something to do with the situation).

There's also something a bit troubling about what generated this response in the first place. As I said earlier, I'm used to Internet commenters getting worked up about various aspects of their favorite piece of entertainment. Even when I don't support the level of unreasonable bile that seeps into the discourse (bile that Devin Faraci analyzed quite well over at Birth Movies Death), I can at least identify somewhat with fans getting so wrapped up in a story that they develop a feeling of ownership over the narrative.

These reactions to the No Man's Sky delay, though, go well past feeling aggrieved over narrative decisions and get into a sense of aggrievement over minor business decisions about release timing. I've seen similar overheated reactions to announcements of a game's pricing or platform exclusivity in the past, but not over a six-week difference in release date.

One Reddit user tried to explain, if not defend, the level of personal outrage the delay has generated in some fans. "A lot of us have been looking forward to this game for years," he writes. "When we got less than a month away from the release date and we get a delay, it was pretty crushing news to a lot of us. Those of us that took time off work have to HOPE that we can reschedule. Those of us that have kids that were also excited for this game have to explain to them that they must wait until school starts."

Yes, sure, that does sound inconvenient. It does not sound like the kind of thing that should reasonably be expected to generate death threats. The fact that this needs to be said at all and that the state of Internet discourse has coarsened to this point is a problem worth noting, even if there are no easy answers.

This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation of state bans on same-sex unions intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry. That right, of course, is now recognized as a guarantee embedded in our Constitution, and in the wake of that historic triumph, we have seen bill after bill in state after state taking aim at the LGBT community. Some of these responses reflect a recognizably human fear of the unknown, and a discomfort with the uncertainty of change.

But this is not a time to act out of fear. This is a time to summon our national virtues of inclusivity, diversity, compassion, and open-mindedness. What we must not do—what we must never do—is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans, for something they cannot control, and deny what makes them human. This is why none of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something they are not, or invents a problem that doesn’t exist as a pretext for discrimination and harassment

Let me speak now to the people of the great state, the beautiful state, my state of North Carolina. You’ve been told that this law protects vulnerable populations from harm—but that just is not the case. Instead, what this law does is inflict further indignity on a population that has already suffered far more than its fair share. This law provides no benefit to society—all it does is harm innocent Americans.
Instead of turning away from our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues, let us instead learn from our history and avoid repeating the mistakes of our past. Let us reflect on the obvious but often neglected lesson that state-sanctioned discrimination never looks good in hindsight. It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations keeping people out based upon a distinction without a difference. We have moved beyond those dark days, but not without pain and suffering and an ongoing fight to keep moving forward. Let us write a different story this time. Let us not act out of fear and misunderstanding, but out of the values of inclusion, diversity, and regard for all that make our country great.

Let me also speak directly to the transgender community itself. Some of you have lived freely for decades. Others of you are still wondering how you can possibly live the lives you were born to lead. But no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama administration wants you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward. Please know that history is on your side. This country was founded on a promise of equal rights for all, and we have always managed to move closer to that promise, little by little, one day at a time. It may not be easy—but we’ll get there together.

Malicious actors may even be able to hijack the malware the government uses to infiltrate botnets, because the government often doesn’t design its malware securely. Government access to the computers of botnet victims also raises serious privacy concerns, as a wide range of sensitive, unrelated personal data could well be accessed during the investigation. This is a dangerous expansion of powers, and not something to be granted without any public debate on the topic.

The key word here is “procedural.” By law, the rules and proposals are supposed to be procedural and must not change substantive rights. But the amendment to Rule 41 isn’t procedural at all. It creates new avenues for government hacking that were never approved by Congress.

Donald Trump assured American voters Thursday night that despite what Marco Rubio had suggested, there was "no problem" with the size of his hands -- or anything else.

"Look at those hands, are they small hands?" the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination said, raising them for viewers to see. "And, he referred to my hands -- 'if they're small, something else must be small.' I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee."

Rubio in recent days revived a decades-old old insult, mocking Trump for having relatively slight hands.

"He's always calling me Little Marco. And I'll admit he's taller than me. He's like 6'2, which is why I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5'2," Rubio said in Virginia on Sunday. "And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can't trust them."

The New York billionaire has heard similar comments about his hands or, more precisely, his fingers, for years.

As Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter recalled online last year: "Just to drive him a little bit crazy, I took to referring to him as a 'short-fingered vulgarian' in the pages of Spy magazine. That was more than a quarter of a century ago."