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Comment by flumpcakes | Hacker News Reader

I personally have never seen any content on Kiwifarms that would lead to statements as we saw the other day from Cloudflare. It is a place where people say some horrible stuff, but I think 4chan is worse (including CSAM) and they are protected by Cloudflare as far as I know.

I don't know much about the people who post there, other than that they say some nasty things. I have also seen such content on Facebook and Twitter - nastier content, in greater volume, with a larger audience.

I have found comments about people on kiwifarms that have been moderated out of other sites (not death threats or harassment, but factual information), in that regard it has been somewhat useful.

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The difference is probably that KF mocks individuals in easy to locate and follow threads. 4-Chan's set up is just too chaotic; proving that 4-Chan is going after a specific person would be...difficult. KF organizes its mocking into easily discoverable forums and threads, which makes it easy for the individuals in question to find all the nastiness.

Finding ANYTHING with any kind of historical evidence on 4-Chan is difficult. The thousand+ posts about keffals are all collected together where she and others can read them all at once, which also contributes to making it look 'worse'.

A haystack may have more needles in it than a sewing kit, but you KNOW which ones are in the sewing kit.

I agree with this. I think the aging-off process on the 4chan boards has probably protected it from a lot of heat. The heinous stuff will be gone and forgotten in a few days but any comments on Kiwifarms remain forever.

Multiple 4chan archives exist, and Google indexes them. Most even have a search function, 4chan doesn't (except for currently active thread titles in catalog)

It's also a cultural thing. 4chan is not a place where you go obsess over one particular person with aims to ruin their life. It's, as you say, a place of chaos and inanity.

And there's a cultural resistance on 4chan to obsessing over one person and trying to get the group to back you up. "Not Your Personal Army."

KF are mean librarians.

4chan are just 12 year olds.

> 4chan is not a place where you go obsess over one particular person with aims to ruin their life.

Uh, this has happened many times. The thing is that it's more difficult to systematically document.

It's more incidental/emergent than intentional, though. And that can happen with any group that has more than a certain number of empathy-impaired people participating. (Including most groups of teenage girls.)

Unless that person is critiquing games from a feminist perspective.

saying "your critiques are bad and you're a grifter" is a far cry from ruining someone's life and doing anything worse got you banned

That was so fucking weird.

I still remember watching AS's videos and being confused as to how something so bland pissed off that many people.

CSAM on 4chan hasn’t been a thing for a decade. Shit 4chan even has a secret archive to help glowies find out who posted CP.

How is 4chan worse? They rapidly take down any CSAM and anything that vaguely resembles a raid. Most KF threads wouldn't survive on today's 4chan for even an hour.

This 12 years old comment describes the situation in 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1947648 , although neglects to mention that things were this way due to strict moderation on 4chan.

I, personally, have seen much worse on 4chan than I have on Kiwifarms. If I read the Cloudflare blog post and didn't know which site it was referring to I would have put 95% of my money on it being 4chan over Kiwifarms.

I am not an omnipotent arbiter of what is bad or worse, this is my own subjective opinion. I just haven't seen anything on Kiwifarms that would call for such a response. It made it seem like we were hours away from people dying.

I guess as an example though:

> they rapidly take down any CSAM

I haven't seen that posted to Kiwifarms in the first place, regardless if 4chan has a quick response.

I've read that 4chan works proactively with law enforcement, regularly notifying them as soon as possible. They don't have a "wait for a warrant" policy that neutral providers claim, they will eagerly submit and support LEOs. This might be why it has survived so long.

The common idea about the forum is that there is no moderation, but the truth is that the moderation is invisible. (The content is beyond the pale, and I don't support it which used to be needless to say)

I think they probably do. There is another comment below saying the owner/moderator/whatever of Kiwifarms also works with "law enforcement organisations" on anything illegal on the site.

Mass murderers have live-streamed their rampages on Facebook. I'm sure Facebook also work with police.

Other than the horrible nasty comments (which I've seen much worse on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/social media in greater numbers) I don't see what's so special about Kiwifarms.

Most sites would delete your posts if you post someones SSN and credit report. Yet, I can easily find such posts going back years on Kiwifarms

For example: http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz...

I think this is obviously bad. I believe in Europe is just flatly illegal under GDPR? I would expect this to be illegal everywhere (if it was private information like medical records etc.) but I'm not a lawyer.

There is another comment below saying the owner/moderator/whatever of Kiwifarms also works with "law enforcement organisations" on anything illegal on the site.

Not ones from New Zealand, though: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/christchurch-mosque-shootings-...

Yeah, the guy comes across as a massive [expletive] in that article. It reminds me of the piratebay "F U" emails from decades ago. It seems to me that a lot of Americans or American Companies (and Swedish pirates) ignore other countries' jurisdiction.

Edit: just reading into this and New Zealand apparently wanted to take legal action (up to ten years in prison) against any New Zealand citizen who simply watched the video on Kiwifarms forums? That's astonishing.

> New Zealand apparently wanted to take legal action (up to ten years in prison) against any New Zealand citizen who simply watched the video on Kiwifarms forums?

Sounds like the owner was right to say "go fuck yourself" then.

This is how I (and I'm sure many others) first heard about kiwifarms, the NZ govt threatening to arrest citizens for even watching footage of the shooting. I was running a little warrant canary meta-service at the time (since the EFF let theirs lapse) and asked Josh Moon if I could implement theirs as a part of my service. Never got a response from him, or it got caught in spam.

Heard about them again when they hosted the twitch source code and revenue leaks, and now a third time with all of the cloudfront stuff. Hosting content like this is always a big gamble, I'm sure Moon knew this was always a possibility.

> Not ones from New Zealand, though: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/christchurch-mosque-shootings-...

While his reply was incredibly edgy and immature, I'm don't think this is a compelling example. The NZ police wanted information on people discussing the shooting after it had already occurred.

Yeah, not ones from Saudi Arabia either. It's an american website, and in that context working with law enforcement means working with american law enforcement.

Yep, I was curious recently and opened KF and 4chan boards. KF is rather tame meanwhile the first page of /pol/ on 4chan was like walking into a KKK convention complete with the hoods and seeing the Third Reich in attendance at their own booth.

>How is 4chan worse?

/pol/ is far worse from a "hate speech" perspective, but not as nearly as bad when it comes to serial harassment.

From a "people are in imminent danger" perspective I don't see how 4chan isn't worse. Remember "Some of you guys are alright, don't come to school tomorrow" from a few years back? Is there an equivalent to that on KF that I'm not aware of? The people there have given up on life in a completely different way than edgy board 4chan users.

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