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Comment by oivey | Hacker News Reader

This article seems to have been posted to make a false equivalence with the current Kiwifarms situation. There’s a pretty clear difference in urgency between taking down DDOSers and deplatforming a forum that is a gathering point for a mob engaging in mass harassment, stalking, and SWATing. One is a nonviolent crime. The other is a crime targeting an individual that had already escalated to the point of a high risk of violence, with no sign of slowing down.

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Cloudflare still protects all those forums which harm people. Kiwifarms is the only one which was sensationized by the twitter crowd.

Look at crime.to. They still send bomb threats [1], exchange stolen credit card data [2], harass people to the point where they lose their houses [3] (SWATing, breaking in into their house and much more included), and probably more on a daily basis.

Still protected by cloudflare. Pretty hypocritical if you ask me.

[1] https://archive.ph/mOBGB

[2] just browse the forum

[3] https://www.merkur.de/bayern/nuernberg/drachenlord-youtube-w...

While working in security, about 80% of attacks were hidden behind Clouflare. And guess what... they never bothered by my complains.

This is a good thing. We have to worry once this is no longer the case. Meanwhile tell your clients to stop calling eval on user input.

What is hypocritical? I'm sure there are many sites that I'd like to see Cloudflare take down. If I don't list every single one of them is that hypocritical?

Kiwifarms just comes to mind for me because someone I know kill themselves and the site took a serious role in that. I'm sure I'd be disgusted, and advocate for the takedown of, many sites.

There's something very wrong with the game community.

I've learned enough during stupid internet fights I have had on reddit to never continue a conversation with an avid gamer, no matter the subject. Stories like this one you linked to on merkur.de (read via Google Translate, but I think they got it right) confirm to me that that was the correct call.

I've been playing more games online lately and I've found two things:

1. Lots of really nice people. I just spent an hour playing a game with a man in Brazil and we used Google translate to chat and teach each other our respective languages while we played.

2. It's actually really easy to get angry. Like, I'm an adult and even I have to be like "hey it's a game chill" to myself - I've never blown up at anyone but... holy shit, it's kind of insane how bad some people are lol. And it's frustrating. Like go to the objective, the game is literally blaring that you should go there, why are you going elsewhere????? over and over again.

With regards to gaming it's just a sort of "worst case" for human collaboration. It's fast paced, high pressure, and communication is both the most important part and also by far the hardest. It is absolutely no surprise to me, whatsoever, that anyone who plays a lot of video games might get angry easily.

Also, as someone who grew up very "on the internet", there's a lot of bitter and angry people out there. They're kind of relatable in a way. Like the whole "I want to fucking die" meme is sort of a meme but also sort of real and relatable, but when you smash that into your brain every day it stops being a meme, and I think that's the case with most irony poisoned internet discussions.

Why game community?

It's more like all of the world enjoy games, including these sociopaths.

You are chasing a red herring.

> Why game community?

At some point you have to blame the community itself, that example OP linked to is not an isolated incident, unfortunately.

Later edit: This [1] is a very sick and not ok community, a very sick one. Harassing a person in his own village, in his own house, on the streets of his own physical community, it's not ok. I didn't know who that Drachenlord person was until seeing OP's link, I'm left wondering how come all of that is legally possible, how come those persons that physically harass him are not in prison by now.

[1] https://youtu.be/-__r5B84Ymg?t=488

I think you have to be really in denial if you think that, on average, gamers are not a more toxic community than others. I think it's not that video games make people bad or something like that. But you probably have some demographics - like young men, for example - who have a lot going on in their lives and aren't always well equipped to handle it. The internet desensitizes everyone and I think that that can be a really bad mix with some people who spend time online and might have a hard time in their actual lives.

Online harassment would presumably be cathartic for some of those people. People lash out for a reason and this is just lashing out at scale.

This can be generalized to any passionate interest community. Like body builders. Young men will be toxic. You just see gamers more because they spend more time on the internet by default.

Being on the internet more is a key factor when talking about toxicity on the internet.

crime.to is a bit different in that the owners and moderators themselves are involved and eventually get caught, whereas kiwifarms love to pretend it's merely a gossip site (even if people on it are not notable and the conversation exceeds gossip quite often). It's more the spiritual successor to 1337crew or carders (the later of which had a policy of all staff using names of greek OR roman gods - sometimes duplicates, which tells you all you need about it)

Also, Drachenlord is being harassed from essentially every german speaking website that doesn't have good moderation policies (hi pr0gramm) or doesn't enforce them (hi twitter); crime.to is not really the flashpoint. He also has a thread on Kiwifarms that's quite active.

I was active quite a lot in that scene a few years ago. The dude who threw eggs at drachenlord was someone from cnw. The dude who broke into his house was from cnw. BasedGod was from cnw too (he’s fortunately in jail today).

But yes, the userbase of cnw and pr0gramm is overlapping. But pr0gramm is at least „only“ allowing bullying. Not the hard stuff such as actual murder, trading narcotics and your grandma’s credit card number + ID. And yes, cnw is way more ruthless than 1337crew ever was.

Anyway, I wanted to point at this because cloudflare said they took KF down because they felt like legal enforcement wasn’t moving fast enough. CNW destroyed lots of lifes too and it isn’t a secret that a few of cnw‘s users are well connected to rocker gangs which pull of murder for hire.

Twitter hosts Antifa types who use it to recruit and coordinate political violence. Takes about 2 minutes to find an example, so they clearly don't moderate this stuff:

https://nitter.net/zelda_in_black

Let's disconnect Twitter from the Internet!

The same people gravely concerned about an infrastructure website being neutral are perfectly fine being on a social media platform that's used for coordinating all kinds of sketchy shit.

"Whataboutism!!!" is the only reply one usually gets when pointing it out.

None of that is recruiting and coordinating political violence. It's hyperbolic and absurd but the only thing any of the posts in there proposed is for people to get armed, trained, and organized. I see posts like this from their political opposition all the time. Neither is organizing or coordinating violence and neither is remotely illegal or threatening.

There are posts about specific events and dates on that Twitter feed. And it's just a quick example I found in 2 minutes, one of countless such accounts.

He’s right you know. Let’s not forget all the evidence of CP reported [0] [1] [2] that Twitter has failed to remove and they seem to have a problem taking it down and hosting it and allowing this CP content to spread is illegal.

No outrage here of course, even when the fact is that it is all true.

[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm...

[1] https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-su...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-f...

> a forum that is a gathering point for a mob engaging in mass harassment, stalking, and SWATing

I keep hearing this allegation but it seems to be supported only by a poorly sourced twitter thread[1] and some articles that dance around the issue. How do we know this, especially the swatting?

And why isn't law enforcement stepping in? The operator is an American afaict. It's not like he's some bond villain living in a cave on the other side of the world.

[1] https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15657972205318144...

You can go look at the forum yourself at https://kiwifarms.ru/ (WARNING: DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU MIGHT BE ONE OF THEIR TARGETS! This would be EXTREMELY bad for your mental health!)

You'll struggle to find swatting, organized harrassment and non-internet stalking, but you'll see plenty of extremely unpleasant comments. If you were a kiwifarm target... well... see my comment above.

> How do we know this, especially the swatting?

Out of all things, I think the swatting is the most easily believable. Swatting is commonly done to streamers, such that I am not surprised at all that it would be used for targeted harassment.

> And why isn't law enforcement stepping in?

Because 1) they have limited resources and must prioritise and 2) America law enforcement seems to have a distinct lean towards the transphobic / homophobic / white supremacist / right-wing, etc.

Just because something is not being actively policed does not mean it's not an actual crime (cf motorists running red lights for an easy example.)

Traffic violations are actually policed pretty closely because it's a source of revenue. High tech is employed to identify drivers, and even some shady tricks like shortening the yellow light. So it's not a good example.

Regardless, it's a public forum(?), there should be tons of evidence if they routinely instigate swattings.

> Traffic violations are actually policed pretty closely

I can stand on the main road where I live in London and see 100+ violations an hour with no enforcement.

> So it's not a good example.

Perfect example if you're in London, though.

Can you also skim Kiwi Farms and find at least a few of these supposed swattings?

Traffic enforcement varies widely. Larger jurisdictions here in the Pacific Northwest seem to not enforce anything outside of parking rules in paid areas.

Meanwhile some neighboring suburban jurisdictions come down harshly on passerbys, even when the stop was unjustified and no crime occured.

How does one reconcile the idea that KiwiFarms is guilty of unspecified crimes that threaten lives and require emergency intervention, but also those alleged crimes aren't urgent enough that authorities would prosecute them? Is that entirely handwaved by calling the whole of U.S. law enforcement "transphobic / homophobic / white supremacist / right-wing"?

As this submission shows, cybercrime is prosecuted in the U.S.

> As this submission shows, cybercrime is prosecuted in the U.S.

You're missing the qualifier "some" before "cybercrime".

DDOSs can have more impact than you think. Such as taking down hospitals and the war in Ukraine. Not really sure which one can be worse though...

https://www.radware.com/security/ddos-experts-insider/ert-ca...

Precisely, once human lives are in extreme danger, it's a different situation

DDOSing is illegal, any illegal content on KF is quickly removed.

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