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Comment by ajvs | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by that exactly?

They have a track record of brutal, lengthy harassment that has already pushed at least one person to take their own life after years of abuse.

Per wikipedia, the actual number is three.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassm...

I wonder how that number compares to other forums and social media sites.

Seems odd to me that everyone is hyper-fixating on that site, as tasteless as it may be, when much larger ones are given a pass.

Mobs always attack the weakest link. KF is not widely known- if it were canceled basically nobody would care.

I think there are two key reasons:

1. KiwiFarms was explicitly created for essentially that purpose

2. It's far more extreme. Part of the reason it exists is because people on these larger sites (notably, 2000s-era SomethingAwful) were getting progressively more concerned and uncomfortable with the behavior. Sure, it's a concern in other places, but there are checks there. KiwiFarms has none of those checks because the behavior is the intended use of the site.

So, sure, you could go after some of these other places, but KF sounds like a very good starting point.

Twitter mobs can drive people to get fired, websites or companies to shut down... But KF literally drives people to suicide or calls in fake situations to get a SWAT team to ambush a home and in the hopes they shoot the people they are harassing.

People are worried more about ending a website than they are worried about ending actual lives.

>But KF literally drives people to suicide or calls in fake situations to get a SWAT team to ambush a home and in the hopes they shoot the people they are harassing.

Are you actually implying that Twitter mobs haven't done all of these things too? This is obviously wrong.

So we should keep up Kiwifarms because something similar has happened on Twitter? Is that the logic? Instead of removing one of the evils let's keep them both up because fairness or something like that?

The logic is that we shouldn't use some sort of "one drop" thinking to characterize a platform as broadly evil based on its worst users.

The problem here is that KF does not have "substantial noninfringing uses", it's all harassment even if most of it is non-fatal.

> to characterize a platform as broadly evil based on its worst users.

It's literally the purpose of KiwiFarms. It's all their users. Any forum board not dedicated to "lolcows" (what they call the people the harass, because they can be "milked for laughs") is in the off-topic section.

I don't think you're aware of what KF is. It's not just a free-form social platform like Twitter. It's specifically for documenting, and scheming to harass lolcows.

It's not "one drop" thinking. It's 99.999% of the drops.

Twitter doesn't exist solely to harass and cyberstalk people. KiwiFarms does. That's the difference.

>People are worried more about ending a website than they are worried about ending actual lives.

People are saying "Call the FBI, not Cloudflare"

If people are doing things that break the law, it's law enforcement's job to do the protecting, not an Internet company providing services.

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