10 Years Ago This Week: Puppies Lose, Diversity Wins

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week of August 22, 2015. 

Ten years ago this week the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies slates dominated the Hugo science fiction award nominations. Even so, they didn't win and it seemed like there was significant pushback against diversity haters. Unfortunately anti-diversity folks are currently in power, which is bad for everyone.

 

Anti-Diversity Advocates Try to Dominate the Hugo Awards

Headline in The Guardian, 24 August 2015

Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies were conservative anti-diversity groups that claimed that the science fiction awards were being given on the basis of race and gender, rather than “quality”. Quality, of course, being the stories they wrote or liked to read.

The Hugo award nominations turned out to be pretty easy to game, if you could get a group together to all nominate the same works. But there was a huge pushback from the voters, members of the  World Science Fiction Society, and none of the Puppy-promoted works won, with some winding up ranked below “No Award”.

The Sad and Rabid Puppies came hard on the heels of Gamergate, a movement targeting women and diversity in the video game industry. That included targeted harassment of game developer Zoe Quinn, and a number of other women, including Anita Sarkeesian, who made videos about sexism in video games.

2015 saw pushback against Gamergate as well.

And Reddit chose to shut down a number of harassing subreddits (to the anger of some Redditors). 

It seemed like maybe the cultural tide was turning (my wishful thinking).

The view from 2025

Looking back 10 years, while these specific movements eventually died off, they were clear precursors to today’s anti-diversity and conspiracy movements. 

Complaints about “Social Justice Warriors” have been replaced by targeting people who are supposedly “woke” and “DEI hires”. 

And that has real repercussions both online and offline. 

References

The Hugo Award official site: 2015 Hugo Awards

Damien Walter, The Guardian, 24 August 2015, "Diversity wins as the Sad Puppies lose at the Hugo Awards" 

Michael Schaub, LA Times, 24 August 2015, "'Sad Puppies' campaign fails to undermine sci-fi diversity at the Hugo Awards"

Amy Wallace, Wired, 27 November 2015, "Sci-fi's Gamergate: How the Hugos were torn apart over diversity"

Jessica Valenti, The Guardian, 29 August 2015 "Anita Sarkeesian interview: 'The word "troll" feels too childish. This is abuse'"