So much of what's awful about Kotaku is a result of its being like every other Gawker site, so... both? The most recent awfulness that I saw was their "coverage" of the whole Paul Christoforo/Ocean Marketting story. They received an email from the guy using his personal email, and then posted that personal email address (not his public one, which is fair game) onto the site for hundreds of angry internet nerds to have fun with. Then the writer just Googled the guy's personal email address, and posted some of the guy's entries on a steroid-use forum. That's where they crossed the line from dogpiling a guy who was just awful at PR and deserved to be run out of business, and turned it into an invitation to personal attacks.

Then when the story was winding down and not getting enough click-throughs, they posted that bizarre thing where the writer accused everybody else of being assholes through the whole affair. Doing a lengthy armchair psycho-analysis of Mike from Penny Arcade, and including one sentence to the effect of "Of course Kotaku isn't without blame, either, in my opinion. But anyway, here's why the rest of those guys are jerks."

Somehow they managed to come across even sleazier than Christoforo, which is quite a feat.

It seems like every single Gawker site has run at least one article of sleazy gossip-mongering combined with self-righteous moralizing -- the Leo Laporte "scandal," outing the head of Apple, trashing Steve Jobs immediately after his death. It must drive a lot of site traffic, so I don't know why I was surprised to see the pattern repeated on Kotaku. Kotaku had just been dudebro stupid but ultimately inoffensive until then, and I'd just avoided it because it's a Gawker site.

(And, full disclosure: I'm still nursing a grudge from years ago, when a pack of their writers came to a Sam & Max release party, sat at a table by themselves the whole night drinking on the company's tab and talking to no one else, and then the next day ran a post that was essentially talking about how fucked up they got the night before and oh incidentally there's a dog and rabbit game coming out or something).

And it occurred to me after I'd already posted the comment, but: I'm aware that an orphan puppy is usually called a "stray." I'd meant to type "kick a puppy that was delivering medicine to orphans," but for whatever reason the idea didn't make it intact from my brain to the keyboard.