If your grievance is "people don't take me seriously in arguments", then you could try deploying sources. There's probably still plenty of /v/ archives from back in the day, right?
But I think "people trust contemporary and retrospective reporting more than me, a guy who self-identifies as having a skin-in-the-game perspective" shouldn't be very surprising.
And, if it means anything, I was reading /v/ at the time, too, was initially sympathetic, and eventually realized it was all just an extension of existing /v/ grievance politics (from my perspective) - "people who disagree with us or make things we don't like are getting attention, which is evil".
I was there for threads where people were seething about positive coverage around Depression Quest before the "Zoe Post" blow-up, which was purely "we don't like that people enjoy experiences that don't suit our tastes".
At some point I realized that there just wasn't any actual ethical issues to speak of around the Depression Quest coverage, and it was just more /v/ seething about outlets liking things they didn't.