Kiwi Farms has been scrubbed from the Internet Archive | Hacker News Reader

Kiwi Farms has been scrubbed from the Internet Archive

theverge.com

15 pointsummonk13 comments

If the operators want it to come back, it will come back. Like sci-hub and piratebay which have also been killed (and resurrected) multiple times. But from what I gather it sounds like they've probably thrown the towel...

Every time site blocking is done, the arguments are "you should prosecute the individuals doing illegal things on the site, not block the whole site outright". Yet here, it seems that everyone wanted to see the whole site gone?

I hadn't heard of KiwiFarms before maybe 2 months ago. I was curious and visited the site, just to find people there meticulously collecting links to YouTube videos and Instagram/Facebook screenshots of other people, and sometimes writing insulting things about them. But I have not seen anything that was a call to violence, doxxing, or anything else criminal, so I assume that it was really only a very small minority on these forums that engaged in these things. But I only checked the first 1 or 2 pages in each section, and most of it not very much in-depth, so I might have missed something.

Yes, the suicides that have been linked to KiwiFarms are a terrible thing that is inexcuasable, but I still get the feeling that the whole "block KF" campaign has been blowing this all a bit out of proportion.

It's just one operator, and he's experiencing some kind of unknown family emergency right now. Josh almost certainly hasn't thrown in the towel. Normally I'd link the page I got this information from, but now I'm not so sure. Interacting with the people being gossiped about is explicitly against the rules, it says so right above the posting box. They can't really prevent anyone from doing that, but neither could any other site.

Kiwi Farms is basically 4chan circa 2007. Make of that what you will.

https://t.me/s/kiwifarms

As a person who lived through Gamergate, my base assumption here is that the attacks Kiwifarms are alleged to have made are entirely fictional. This is something that I (and you) could possibly check if there was some kind of Archive of the Internet, but apparently that evidence was just destroyed for reasons which are not suspicious at all.

That might well be, but I doubt it could be validated with an archive of the site, because much of it probably happened in PMs or was at some point deleted by the mods/admins.

It's incredibly difficult to validate things "on the internet" these days, because basically it boils down to people you don't know claiming things you can't confirm or deny without having been there.

I mean some people maintain that byuu, who is said to be one of the KF victims driven into suicide, cannot even be confirmed dead since nobody except some of his closest friends know where his grave is, and because his death is not registered in the US database of deaths abroad. If I had been harrassed by anyone in the extent he has, this is exactly how I would have staged my death to "disappear" and start a new life in some other country... I really want to believe he is still alive and kicking in a small town somewhere in rural asia...

It’s still available via its onion address. I think the more websites that are pushed onto the dark net is just going to increase its prevalence and use. I silencing bad behavior rather than confronting it, it’s just going to proliferate.

But deplatforming works in general. You will never stop the most determined crazies but there is a huge amount of mentally disturbed people who are potentially violent but won’t be arsed to find a site through TOR.

Considering tor is run by the feds, I would think everything is going according to plan.

What's confronting it if it isn't silencing?

It's still available at the other major archive site, e.g. https://archive.ph/uLpNt

And the site itself is still there at its ".top" domain, and its Tor hidden service.

I'd not heard of Kiwi Farms before this whole censorship attempt, but have been finding it fascinating reading over the past few days. Really quite depraved content, but oddly captivating, in a scurrilous kind of way. Feels like some sort of obsessively crowdsourced tabloid of online weirdos.

  >I'd not heard of Kiwi Farms before this whole censorship attempt...

Me neither. When I started seeing the name on HN, I honestly thought it was literally a kiwi farming website [Do they even farm kiwis in NZ].

Like you, I at also took a look to see what the fuss was about. But, judging by the titles of the various discussion threads, it just looked like a collection of moronic drivel. So I didn't bother reading anything.

Still, that's at least two of us who'd never even have heard of the site, much less visited it, of it wasn't being censored.

There's definitely going to be a Streisand effect from all this. I hadn't heard about KF until a couple months ago too when an Asahi developer I follow was complaining about them on twitter. Now just about the entire tech community knows of them.

I have zero interest in participating with their content, but sent KF a crypto donation to help support forums with less censorship. I'm sure they'll be getting a nice bump in funding from all this.

Yeah, it was some strange content but definitely nothing criminal, and especially nothing warranting purging the forum from everywhere.

It looks more like some personal vendetta that this "keffels" person had against them.

4chan had much worse content, yet even they were not entirely purged from the internet...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com