I posted it because I used to hang around there some years ago, long before gamergate was a thing. There was always a lot of casual racism and misogyny going on, as well as the stylised self-loathing.
But my general impression was that you would get many helpful replies if you found the right thread to ask and ignored the first three replies that told you to kill yourself. And while it certainly seems a hostile environment for women and minorities the very basic structure of the site made personal attacks difficult. And I know that the population of certain niche threads was neither as male nor as white as you would expect. Frankly, I had a certain fondness for the place.
On the other hand I can totally see how the "ironic" toxicity could quickly turn into the real thing, especially if it didn't involve getting up from the PC. I also hadn't really spent much thought on how the the very anonymity, the fact that you didn't have to be anyone, that you were discouraged from being anyone, would disproportionally attract people who couldn't just shrug off all the silliness. And this was the good old internet that was supposed to save our society before Facebook came along.
In hindsight it is no surprise that it would turn into Trump country.