The Dev Behind One of the Best SNES Emulators Has Died

Kiwi Farms is a toxic community where even their own targets are dangerous.

At the time, from what I saw, it wasn't actually so bad. I would consider it distasteful, even offensive at times, but from what I've seen they weren't organizing harassment or bully campaigns. The general attitude was something along the lines of "haha, what a loser/idiot", and in some of the more tragic cases it was also followed up by "but this is very sad to see :-(".

I don't recall seeing the targetting of people based on their sexuality or gender identity. The range of opinions on things like GamerGate were fairly diverse, but the main attitude was "petty manchildren crying about muh gamez".

Plenty of stuff I disagreed with, and plenty of comments that I would describe as being made in bad taste or downright offensive, but my take-away was that, at the time, the description of a vile nest of horrible reactionary alt-Right bullies as some on RationalWiki claimed it, was pretty off the mark. We had plenty of trolls on RationalWiki for sure, and some pretty vile ones too, and most people on KiwiFarms thought they were just a bunch of losers. Yet, somehow, they were still attributed to KiwiFarms shrug.

I don't know the details of the this situation, and it's been six years so all sorts of things could have changed, but based on my previous experience I'm very hesitant to immediately jump to the conclusion that it's a "forum of people that bullies vulnerable people until they kill themselves" because I've seen all sorts of hyperbolic claims before and found them untrue. Maybe it's correct this time, but ... yeah. Fool me once, fool me twice...

And if this comment wasn't controversial enough already: I feel this stuff is sometimes taken way too seriously, and that this is actively harmful to people like Near. I completely understand why they would feel upset if people say ugly things about them, but a lot of this crowd seems to provide only validation and recognition for being upset, and not enough "just some rando losers on a forum, get over it and stop crying". I don't think this is helping and an (unintentional) but vicious feedback loop. The fact of the matter is that the world has ugly people saying ugly things. This has always been true for all of history, and will always remain true. It sucks, but we can't change that. You can either shrug at insults or slurs, or you can become very upset with it, and it's absolutely not a given unchangeable fact that "getting upset" is the only possible action.

I don't want to put too much weight in this letter as it's obviously written from a place of grief and anger, but it mostly seems to externalize Near's problems to KiwiFarms. It seems to me that their problems were mostly internal, as is usually the case with people suffering from long-term depression. Perhaps the external KiwiFarms "pushed them over the edge", but that's not the same as being the primary cause. This is important because if you focus on the wrong things you're not going to solve whatever problems you have.

However, no matter what I say here, or what the facts of the case may be (maybe it is as bad as claimed, maybe not) I think ... none of that will really matter here anyway :-/

So maybe start with Christy Tiegen. Or Chris Evans. Jim Carrey. Some big names. They've all bullied people, including school children.

once the upvote rate decreases, so does the story's position.

very explicable.

(and previous HN discussion on that retirement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644647)

As for the people running the site, I don't know, they are just cruel.

KF itself has been around for nearly a decade, and some of their targets had been harassed by members of KF for years prior to founding a dedicated website. There might be kids on KF, but the average user is firmly in the adult demographic.

> I just don't understand the mentality of people to do this and not feel remorse.

It's a mentality of dehumanization: their targets, in their eyes, deserve less than the basic dignity we give to human beings. That capacity for dehumanization stems from years of indoctrination in reactionary communities.

Don’t downplay the issue.

The problem is that they specifically select targets based on how they react. The more a target obsesses over their own thread or responds emotionally to what KF posts about them, the more KF focuses attention on them. So KF’s favorite targets who get the most abuse are going to be exactly those who are least equipped to handle it.

A bunch of bullies does care about who the victim is, all they care about is the jolt of adrenaline and the feeling of power an impunity.

But ultimately many of us have strong feelings on many things, yet still possess the empathy to care about the well-being of those we disagree with.

In my experience, bullies may use a certain external “vector” to bully others, but they do so because of their own internal issues that they choose to deal with by inflicting pain on others by exploiting those vectors.

In some cases this might be anti-LGBTQ, in others it might be classist, or really any place someone can find and exploit a weakness [1] in someone else.

At that point, it doesn’t matter if the person you’re bullying is somebody “on your side”, because it’s not really about the surface issue to begin with.

Unfortunately it makes situations like this even harder to deal with, because it’s not just a matter of trying to impart empathy on the bully.

[1] which is not to imply any identity is necessarily a weakness, but rather may be something a person struggles with personally and therefore provides an opening for someone else to exploit.