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This seems like a completely irrelevant response. I'm not asking you to dox yourself or disclose any more identifying details than you already have. I'm just pointing out that it's factually untrue that Gamergate occurred in that period. You literally did not hear the word "Gamergate" at any point between 2008 and 2013.
I think OP is trying to recount his impressions as someone who stumbled onto Gamergate in, say, 2016 or so. Especially if you're a kid with a poor sense of time who hasn't looked into the details, I think it's fair that you might've gotten the impression that it had been going on for longer than it really had been.
A bunch of stuff that happened prior to The Zoe Post, like the backlash to the 2012 "Tropes vs Women" Kickstarter, kind of ended up getting rolled into "Gamergate" in retrospect -- people on both sides saw value in either joining the popular/trending movement, or painting all their critics as members of the same hate group.
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Unless you were researching rare ant species, which many of us learned about later.
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And you're missing the point of what I'm saying. It was merely a colourful way to express that I didn't know when it occurred because the whole thing was so impenetrable for me back then. I wasn't "online" before 2014.
I should have written 2008-2014 for clarity.
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