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Comment by kithrothrowi | Hacker News Reader

I would like to point out that byuu's recent response to that thread was composed and dignified: https://kiwifarms.net/threads/byuu-byuu_nyan-setsunakun0.430.... As someone with who wasn't familiar with the drama I came away with the impression that byuu handled it rather well in the end (and also has grown as a person thanks to it).

It does make me wonder if from the perspective of PR and reducing further trolling posting a calm, eloquent and self-deprecating defense is better or worse than not responding at all. What would you do if you had a Kiwi Farms thread with your embarrassing posts, some very old?

(Throwaway because I don't want a link to Kiwi Farms in my post history.)

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Hey it could be worse, imagine having a link to your own KF thread in a frontpage HN article. Now that's a bad look ^-^;

Referring to GP, of course. I appreciate the link to my reply. For any folks here that read the post, please also read my reply if you don't mind. For folks who don't read the thread at all, just note that this is about me saying dumb things online, mostly when I was a young adult. I haven't actually done anything heinous nor are there substantiated allegations to that effect.

Specifically, my reason for stepping down is because in spite of doing my best to change and better myself, my mere presence was still dragging down the other developers working on my emulators, and my friends were starting to get dragged into things because of their association with me. They went rather easy on me on KF, but there's another 289 pages of this on 4chan. It got to a point where someone there was compiling a list of my friends' real names, photographs, and where they lived. A friend of mine suffered an anxiety attack when I replied to them on social media. Another was fearful enough to delete her Twitter account.

I can handle criticism and admit my mistakes, but I can't handle other people paying the price for them. I feel personally responsible for that, because I am. If I had behaved more professionally, this wouldn't have happened. So it's on me.

As someone that was just curious about what sort of drama was going on I think you responded well and if it's made you a better person there isn't anything to feel bad about.

I have seen stuff from you pop up on here from time to time that I found impressive and cool. I hope you still find motivation to do cool and impressive things and share them with the world even if you are closing this chapter of your journey.

My god the people in that thread are deranged. I don’t know you, but damnit you did something that 100% of the other losers in that thread failed to do- you changed history for the better through your code.

Creating, and more importantly, maintaining, a major open source project takes guts, skill, and tenacity. Take a deep breath, tell yourself “good job” and know deep down that you’ve accomplished something that only an infinitesimally small number of people on this earth are able to achieve.

Losers gonna lose, I guess. You’re not a loser. You don’t owe those losers anything, least of all your time.

Apologizing to internet trolls is a zero sum game.

If you enjoy working on it, and others enjoy using your work, keep doing it and just ignore the idiots on the internet, they'll eventually get bored and go find someone more interesting to harass.

I did have just that: won't dig it up. I also have a friend who's an odd character, sometimes far from well, but who's also a Kiwi poster. They sought me out and warned me, "This is happening. Do not respond, do not get sucked into it, let it subside".

I think that was wise advice. There's a temptation to be like 'wait, no, I'm cool: let me show how I'm basically cool with this' and it'll play well to some extent but there's a limit. In a place like that you are not there to demonstrate your coolness: either you're trying to 'show them' (bad attitude) or you're offended and angry that they are slighting you (worse attitude!)

We are all basically 'lolcows' and 'cool people' at the same time. Trying to post a defense against being a lolcow shows a kind of arrogance that the whole site is set up to exploit: best to just not respond, and not to be too judgemental or offended. I try to do stuff that doesn't belong on Kiwi Farms and is not worthy of their attention. I try to be a very uninteresting, dried-up, unrewarding lolcow :)

I clicked that link expecting to be horrified and was still shocked by the first thing I glanced at. Thanks for linking, but I wouldn't advise anyone to click it. It's not worth it.

To be fair, I have a much better fursona now ^-^;;

https://twitter.com/Kampidh/status/1234029776144175110

(it's G-rated, don't worry.)

I was referring to the immediate n-word. Furries are fine, shaming people for what they enjoy is cringe. Fwiw I think your fursona is adorable.

Ah, yeah. Lovely bunch there.

> Fwiw I think your fursona is adorable.

Thank you very much ^-^

Your Fursona is adorable, though, uhh.. what species are you?

Thank you! Been calling them a dracat. Half-dragon, half-cat hybrid. It's a play on having traits and tendencies of both ^-^

I was thinking dutch angel dragon or something, so I was confused.

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