This afternoon, the Twitter account for the hollowed-out remains of a once-popular video game website began counting down to an announcement. "The best gaming token is coming... stay tuned for updates!" read a post from Kotaku’s Twitter. Some presumed that the site’s owner, G/O Media, had launched a new misbegotten scheme to staunch bleeding from the publisher’s countless self-inflicted wounds. But no, turns out the account had been hacked – as a result of one of the many aforementioned self-inflicted wounds.
G/O Media revoked writers’ access to sites' social media accounts years ago, following then-Kotaku sister site Gizmodo’s promotion of an article that happened to criticize G/O's handling of a situation involving a disabled employee (Disclosure: Everybody at Aftermath has worked for Kotaku in the past, and Luke, Riley, and I were still at the site when this occurred).
Despite this apparent desire to preserve the sanctity of sites’ accounts, G/O was careless enough for Kotaku's to get hacked in service of the most embarrassing promotion possible: a memecoin with the name $KOTA, which is either short for Kotaku or an acronym meaning “King Of The America,” depending on who you ask. The tweets remained up for over two hours before they were finally deleted. Admittedly, Twitter is a shitshow these days – a lawless land except when it comes to things that are actually legal – but this situation was nonetheless largely if not entirely avoidable.
If you need a refresher, this is the same G/O Media that in early 2024 saddled Kotaku, a news site, with a guides-focused editorial edict that caused its then-EIC to resign in protest. A pivot to guides has evidently done little to improve Kotaku’s flagging fortunes, with G/O losing one writer and laying off two more in November, leaving what used to be one of the most influential video game websites in existence with just six full-time staff.
We must conclude that there is simply no rake too obvious for these clumsy buffoons to avoid stepping on. It is inevitable that these pioneers of the ancient art of the self-own will find new ways to innovate in the coming months, and that is one of the only truly exciting prospects that remains in this dreary, imploding world of ours – or at least it would be, if it didn’t splash back on writers who actually know what they’re doing.
