The bulk of the article is about reacting to largely inchoate disapproving reviews. Furthermore, those reviews (according to one post quoted in the article) make up one-tenth of one percent of disapproving reviews. That suggests it's quite easy to find a lot of reviews that aren't screeds. The article does a very poor job of explaining why it's worth taking such a small minority of angrily-worded reviews so personally.
Surprisingly, the part of the article that comes close to talking about what you brought up gets very little coverage and doesn't start the article (burying the lede). There too, according to the article, those posts (which you refer to) make up "an even smaller proportion". So those posts which might justifiably concern not only aren't featured prominently in the article, but constitute an indefinably smaller portion of what was already vaguely described as small. One has to wonder why the language you're talking about isn't the basis for the article. Seems a shame to focus on petty namecalling if publishing someone else's address presumably to encourage the public to shame or harass them in person or to "try and find their family" (quoting the article) presumably for some in-person dealing is commonplace. I don't know if that's the case, and neither your reply nor the article help anyone determine how frequent that is.
The article claims "What I’m drawing attention to here is the normalisation of online abuse — both from the perspective of content creators and from the point of view of the audience. It is now, for a significant part of our audience, the way in which they communicate with creators.". That's an evidenceless innumerate claim from the article which very much needs some backing. We simply aren't given information we need to make sense of the claims. What constitutes "normalisation"? How much is "significant"?
But what we are given is propaganda -- "creators" -- a word used to compare the programmer to a deity so as to "elevate authors' moral standing above that of ordinary people" (as https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Creator explains), which is preposterous. They're programmers or software developers, working people who sometimes write programs some people don't like and less than 1% of whom (we're told) express themselves very poorly.
You are going well beyond the article with your evidenceless claims about the police, police resources, and everyone's speech rights.
I assume they are a very small proportion of feedback. On the other hand, in my current non-game-development career, customers never threaten to rape or kill me. Never ever! It's never happened!
It's great that people threatening rape or homicide comprise less than 1% of game customers and not 20% or 50% or 80%. But a little goes a long way, when it comes to people threatening to rape or kill you. Many people are going to treat those threats as a significant incentive to stay out of game development.
Surprisingly, the part of the article that comes close to talking about what you brought up gets very little coverage and doesn't start the article (burying the lede). There too, according to the article, those posts (which you refer to) make up "an even smaller proportion". So those posts which might justifiably concern not only aren't featured prominently in the article, but constitute an indefinably smaller portion of what was already vaguely described as small. One has to wonder why the language you're talking about isn't the basis for the article. Seems a shame to focus on petty namecalling if publishing someone else's address presumably to encourage the public to shame or harass them in person or to "try and find their family" (quoting the article) presumably for some in-person dealing is commonplace. I don't know if that's the case, and neither your reply nor the article help anyone determine how frequent that is.
The article claims "What I’m drawing attention to here is the normalisation of online abuse — both from the perspective of content creators and from the point of view of the audience. It is now, for a significant part of our audience, the way in which they communicate with creators.". That's an evidenceless innumerate claim from the article which very much needs some backing. We simply aren't given information we need to make sense of the claims. What constitutes "normalisation"? How much is "significant"?
But what we are given is propaganda -- "creators" -- a word used to compare the programmer to a deity so as to "elevate authors' moral standing above that of ordinary people" (as https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Creator explains), which is preposterous. They're programmers or software developers, working people who sometimes write programs some people don't like and less than 1% of whom (we're told) express themselves very poorly.
You are going well beyond the article with your evidenceless claims about the police, police resources, and everyone's speech rights.