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Comment by ThrowawayTestr | Hacker News Reader

A website was bullied off the internet because it showcased the horrible activities of horrible people. I'm far more concerned that a handful of Twitter users can memoryhole an entire community.

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You say that as if the people running KF didn’t know what the site was for. And a publicly known reason for that website’s existence is because bullies need a place to coordinate harassment.

Having the power to shut that place and therefore behavior down but choosing not to means they were complicit. Deplatforming works, the influx of new bullies shrinks when you make their place less public.

That was unequivocally not a publicly known reason. There were thousands upon thousands of “lolcows” documented in kiwifarms and the sites culture strongly emphasized not “disturbing the grazing lolcows” or “taking things IRL.” That much was obvious for me as somebody who only visited the site a few times a year out of curiosity.

That may be obvious to you. Have you tried asking some of the people documented there what they think about the site's culture, and how well it discourages harassment against them?

I’ve been on the internet long enough to know what harassment is, and I went on Kiwi Farms enough to know the site culture. There will always be people laughing at other people on the internet and I would prefer it stays that way.

The removal in question is an archive. A read-only snapshot cannot be used to coordinate anything. But it can be used to view the documentation they have collected.

Therefore it would seem that this particular removal is motivated by erasing the documentation and performing a cover up.

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