I feel like people read GDQs second statement (the "we need more evidence, no action taken for now") entirely differently than I did. They literally ask for more reports and say that the Discord screenshots aren't conclusive enough to justify banning anyone yet. Why people think that was a "grand statement" absolving Goose and Grav of guilt is beyond me, and honestly seems like people are willfully going out of there way to see negligence instead of caution. Considering the source of the allegations, I think an ~8 hour turnaround time is pretty impressive, and honestly a lot better than I expected.
It wasn't a "grand statement absolving" Goose or Grav but it most definitely felt like a dismissal considering they had to issue further tweets to further explain themselves. That was the problem, it felt completely insincere to a lot of people who experience these situations.
That combined with them basically finding the the accusations thrown at Grav as inconclusive led to people seeing this as pure negligence, which it basically was. All of this garbage is out in the air, Goose is openly all of those things on his Twitter page and they couldn't verify the Discord because Goose went back to scrub all Discord evidence. You don't potentially hang around someone like Goose unless you're at best willing to tolerate hate speak or at worst actually alt-right.
The turnaround happened because literally the entire community was DMing Coolmatty web archive posts and links to The-Elite while calling him a huge spineless fuck. If the community wasn't so pissed off, there's a good chance that Grav would have stayed to play Doom 64 come AGDQ time because GDQ did fuck all further investigation. I say this because even I produced links to Grav scrubbing their politics thread.
A better example of how to deal with inconclusive accusations would be how Panda Global dealt with the Infiltration domestic abuse allegations. You issue a statement that these specific problems (not "discrimination" and "differing opinions") are really serious, have no place, you will do further investigation and questioning to determine their legitimacy because of their severity but will bench Grav in the meantime because of the severity of the accusations. You don't rush and go "hey Discord messages are inconclusive, nothing to be done unless we get more evidence" when you have very good reason to believe the legitimacy of the Discord statements.
