Heroku terminates Ruqqus site and account without a warning or an explanation | Hacker News Reader

Heroku terminates Ruqqus site and account without a warning or an explanation

ruqqus.com

35 pointsecmascript29 comments

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it was because of bad user-contributed content.

This problem happens a lot with reddit competitors whose selling point is they don't "censor" (e.g. Voat). What happens is the people who are so extreme they got banned from reddit end up on your platform, and these people are generally pretty terrible. Next thing you know you're hosting a predominantly far right racist discussion forum and your hosting provider wants nothing to do with you.

It's because these firms are controlled by people who wish to wipe out any opposition to their agenda. Calling anything they delete racist or sexist is simply a smear tactic. In this case Heroku didn't even bother with that: as the article states, no reason for the sudden termination was given, which appears to violate their own ToS.

Opening the front page of Ruqqus shows a lot of content actually objecting to racism, for instance, this post:

https://ruqqus.com/post/31lq/their-goal

which highlights and objects to a tweet that says:

"Why should there be a place for white people in our better world? As long as white people are around, they will continue to make our better world impossible. BIPOCS are the ones who are in this together. White people are not welcome or needed."

This kind of racist rhetoric is rampant and easily found on places like Twitter or Reddit. Scrolling through the content on the Ruqqus front page I didn't see any racism. I did see a lot of angry posts about BLM-linked violence and anti-white racism, but that's the sort of thing people are theoretically meant to be angry about, isn't it?

The first comment on that link is literally "I'm not really sure how much more whites need to figure out their genocide is in progress." If you're trying to make the argument that this is somehow objecting to racism, then you've simultaneously managed to shoot yourself in both feet. This is literally bog standard Neo-Nazi white supremacist conspiracy theory propaganda that you've linked to. If anything it proves why Heroku wants nothing to do with this site.

Maybe, most likely true. But either way I think it's pretty noteworthy that a big hosting provider like Heroku can't give them a heads up. I don't agree with most stuff that is being posted there, but the same goes with Reddit or Twitter. It is true that there are a lot of communities there that came there because they were banned from Reddit but that doesn't really make all of the communities bad even if there is a lot of shitty stuff up voted to the front page.

This can happen with any app even if it's more unlikely.

I've been enough on the insides of these kind of decisions in the past to know that it's very much lawyer and PR-driven, and that the right thing to do from those perspectives is to terminate the relationship as quickly as possible. If you give lots of lead time then you're just creating a festering sore for yourself and giving the other party time to mobilize against you. It's better for it to be a fait accompli with minimal notice given, so that the other party immediately focuses on moving on rather than trying to mobilize to reverse the decision.

It's definitely not good for the company caught on the receiving end of such a decision, of course, but the hosting company is optimizing for themselves, as all companies are inherently selfish. And given how much racist garbage Ruqqus is hosting, I don't think Heroku cares too much about any hardship incurred.

> It is my opinion that by not warning us first (ex. "please remove X which violates Heroku's acceptable use policy") that Heroku actually violated their own terms of service.

They clearly never read the Heroku terms of service which have this at the top:

>If you are found to be in violation of our policies at any time, as determined by Heroku in its sole discretion, we may warn you or suspend or terminate your account

Literally Heroku says that they may terminate you with no warning.

edit: And based on a quick glance at the site a five year old could see how it violates multiple parts of the acceptable use policy.

"I do not believe we violated Heroku ToS (though Heroku may think otherwise) ..... It is my opinion that by not warning us first (ex. "please remove X which violates Heroku's acceptable use policy") that Heroku actually violated their own terms of service."

I've never used the site before but, looking at just a fraction of the content, it's the gutter of the internet. Obviously that's my opinion, but if I were Heroku I'd have probably made the same decision.

Never heard of them, so taking a look at their patreon to see what they might have been...

"Ruqqus is an open source, USA-based, First-Amendment focused social platform restoring free speech to the internet."

If I'm not surprised, why are they?

I had no idea what Ruqqus is/was, apparently it's a game community site. The other threads right next to this one are people making fun of 'lefties'. I'm guessing those are not about handedness; I expect this is about some communities that have crossed from political speech over to hate (in Heroku's estimation, at least).

Lots of swastikas on that page.

> At 16:09 EDT on 04 Sep 2020 (about 26 hours ago), SalesForce (the owner of web hosting company Heroku) notified us that they had suspended the Ruqqus live and test server environments, with account termination to follow twenty-four hours later.

Assuming Ruqqus is in the EDT time zone, this means they got notified shortly after 4 PM on a Friday that their account would be terminated in 24 hours.

Does that mean that 23 of the 24 hours they would have to download all their data would be outside of normal work hours, with 16 hours of those 24 being on a weekend?

I can't think of any reasonable justification for such short notice. If it is a TOS violation that the hosting company is not willing to let them try to fix, account termination should be several business days after the immediate live environment suspension.

Never heard of that site but just from browsing the top post it looks like an alternative social network (or in their words: "free of censorship") like Gab and others and Heroku probably decided they don't want the headache of hosting them.

Scroll down about a screenful and you'll see someone pointing out that Marc Benioff is Jewish, and saying "Every. Single. Time." 42 upvotes.

This seems to be a reddit alternative, by my quick search.

What's the audience like? Is it just a competitor, or a voat-like site to receive those people... not welcome in more mainstream places?

Based on looking at the front page, the latter.

Can anyone explain in one sentence what Ruqqus is? Are there any radical (politically right or left wing) discussions? Is it comparable to reddit or 4Chan? We are running a few business apps on on Heroku and this is slightly worrying.

On the other hand, isn't Heroku a really expensive choice if you are running a popular website with many users?

check out the comments, it's racial slurs and swastikas all around

Based on the front page it looks like another place where /r/TheDonald ended up. Except even more radical. So far right wing political including what many would call hate speech, racism, etc.

It's comparable to 8Chan or Gab or Voat - it's a refuge for all the people who have been censored from places like 4Chan or Twitter or Reddit, and it turns out there's a reason why those folks get banned from such sites and when you get them all together in a room, predictable things happen.

(This is one of the few examples of such sites showing technical competence, so I wouldn't put too much stock in their decision to go with Heroku, and I wouldn't worry about your own apps.)

You can be censored from 4Chan? Wow!

It's ironic but 4chan has quite a lot of moderation and bans and is also more pro-actively cooperative with law enforcement than other platforms like reddit, facebook etc. That last point might be why it has continued to survive.

Is there any reason why this is being Flagged?

It reads to me the site is something similar to Reddit.

So another right-wing white-power haven like Voat and Gap.

I scroll down a bit into the comments and it's all "jews this", "jews that", etc. I'm pretty sure this was completely deserved. Mods, can we just close this pathetic attempt to get more users on this right-wing site?

No, every time a platform or person gets banned online it's our solemn duty as the last bastion of true online intellectualism to clutch our pearls over the crushing Orwellian boot of political correctness and the death of free speech, the internet and civilization that it represents, and then get bogged down in pedantic tangents about the nature of free speech, hate speech, SJWs, leftists, Nazis and how Stallman did nothing wrong.

I don't make the rules, those are just the rules.

Looking at the site I suspect someone doesn't agree with free speech - common misconception in the US that free speech only applies to stuff you agree with.

Wherever you host next try fronting with Cloudflare and make sure your origin servers only accept connections from their servers. Cloudflare generally supports free speech and it provides a layer of indirection to keep people from complaining to your hosting provider. Make sure you don't expose your origin IPs in server messages or DNS.

It's a common misconception that free speech has no legal limits, and that it affects private companies. Neither of these are true. Hate speech is not protected, and companies certainly aren't obligated to enable it.

> Hate speech is not protected...

It is in fact protected in the United States:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...

> ...and companies certainly aren't obligated to enable it.

Nevertheless, it is important to know which private companies do support free speech, including all the ugly bits.

> "It's a common misconception that free speech ... affects private companies"

Incorrect, it is the US First Amendment that doesn't affect private companies but the First Amendment != freedom of speech. Your statement is a uniquely American misconception.

Freedom of speech, as a philosophy, affects everyone. That's why the ACLU has historically defended some rather deplorable people; liberal principles matter.

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