Hacker News Reader

Comment by IllIllIllIIlIll | Hacker News Reader

I would pay to hear eastdakota try to rationalize why protecting KF is a net good for the world. He professes to be a free speech absolutist, which is how they justified protecting controversial sites like The Daily Stormer and 8chan, but the purpose of KF is simply to harm specific, usually non-notable people through relentless doxxing (leading to relentless harassment or worse) usually only justified by them being transgender, or neurodivergent, or otherwise "cringe". There is nothing to debate in the free speech maximalist marketplace of ideas here, unless you seriously want to entertain the idea that vulnerable people deserve to be destroyed for the entertainment of psychopaths.

View on HN

As usual, it's a minority of users causing all of the problems. Most people on KF probably aren't doxxing or sending threats, but any time you get a group of people together to talk about someone, chances are some will take it too far. The ultimate example of this was Princess Diana (remember that?). The public was obsessed with her, and that demand fed a constant swarm of paparazzi which eventually led to her crash and death. If people were posting about her on KF, KF would surely be shut down by now.

There need to he clear rules. If we shut down every forum where someone says something bad once, are we going to shut down Facebook and Instagram? Of course not, we'll stop short of that. So we give an unfair advantage to Facebook and Instagram, forever entrenching them as the only platforms where speech can happen?

Getting back to the Princess Diana analogy, KF probably started as a harmless place to joke about public figures, but in the modern world where everyone is pushed to cultivate their own personal "brand", even someone as uninteresting as a nintendo emulator programmer, it puts regular people at risk of the worst kinds of stalking and harassment etc.

> KF probably started as a harmless place to joke about public figures

There's no need to assume, we know exactly where KF started. It originally focused on one specific target before branching out, a severely autistic person known as Chris Chan who isn't notable for any reason other than being a target of incredibly intense stalking, harassment and manipulation. The site didn't need to "fall from grace" when its baseline from day one was stalking a random mentally ill person for amusement.

> who isn't notable for any reason other than being a target of incredibly intense stalking,

This is demonstrably false. Chris Chan became the obsession of the internet because of his incredibly odd and anti-social behavior, such as plastering signs around campus looking for a "boyfriend free girl" and telling other men with boyfriends to go jump off a cliff (https://sonichu.com/cwcki/Attraction_Sign#The_Sign.2C_Mark_1). Calling him "not notable" is just not true.

Down the Rabbithole has a good video about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IPtLvxO8hs

A neurodivergent person acting eccentrically or inappropriately does not in itself make them notable or a public figure. There are many people in the world like Chris Chan, the only reason Chris Chan is famous is because they're the one who got singled out by the internet.

Even if you do class Chris Chan as "notable", is that supposed to make it OK to strip-mine a mentally ill person for content?

I wish people would have just left Chris alone, but I think it's obtuse to dismiss Chris's behaviour as simply that of a "neurodivergent person". Acknowledging his strange and provocative behaviour isn't condoning the harassment he received.

Speaking of harassment, it's also misleading to refer to him as a the first "target". Kiwi Farms (formerly the CWCiki Forums) started as a place to discuss Chris Chan, but it was far from the only or the worst one. For example, KF was strongly against the "idea guys", who actively tried to harass Chris in real life.

There's lots of nuance here, and I think we ought to acknowledge what is fact versus fiction. Otherwise we're just talking about a made-up boogeyman.

Chris wasn't who OP should have used as an example. He was also charged with incest (which made for very weird reading since Chris now uses she/her[1]).

When people do insane shit online for internet fame they don't really get to cry when it goes sideways.

The world is full of crazy people, especially online.

I think it's crazy having seen the advent of the internet, to watch it devolve into people begging for attention/money.

I wish so bad we could go back to usenet and geocities when people posted out of love and passion, but 'You can never go home'.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.in/thelife/news/online-creator-c...

An incest charge in 2021 means decades of harassment was justified?

Don't be obtuse, that wasn't what I said at all.

Decades of posting all about your life online and doing insane things for internet fame, and even your own personal details means they can't cry when that attention isn't always positive.

Chris is himself a troll. He has physically attacked a gamestop employee, his mother tried to run over another one.

Again, if OP wanted to garner sympathy, Chris wasn't the example to be used.

> Chris is himself a troll. He has physically attacked a gamestop employee, his mother tried to run over another one.

He also gloated about having a girlfriend while deliberately witholding information that he knew would get him in trouble; he teased out hints that it was his mother, such as "she's an older lady", "we've known each other a long time", "she graduated from <school> in accounting".

Who used Chandler as an example to garner sympathy? Someone speculated Kiwi Farms started as a harmless place to joke about public figures. Someone else responded with the fact it started with stalking Chandler. Then it became an argument about notability.

Maybe your ranting about online fame would make sense if reading about this person was 1 of my hobbies. This person would be the unknown creator of a low quality web comic without Kiwi Farms and related groups as far as I know.

The fact that KF goes after non-criminals, and functions as an infomob with no boundaries for privacy or parasocial etiquette imo is damning of their intentions.

>I would pay to hear eastdakota try to rationalize why protecting KF is a net good for the world.

Let me try. KF is a place to archive the publicly-posted online antics of people who willingly publish said antics to the internet. Interacting with the subject of a thread is against the rules and anyone bragging about doing so is banned. If you dislike the idea of people making fun of you for your actions, don't broadcast them to the internet.

You and I both know why details like home addresses and phone numbers are documented by KF threads. Interacting being against the rules is basic ass-covering, there's no reason for details like those to be posted unless the intent is for someone to harass them, whether that person is a KF user who knows not to admit it, or a drive-by reader who found the thread on Google.

Nobody is buying the line that KF is a purely passive observer, when drawing their attention is so strongly correlated with receiving harassment, or that they only observe intentionally published information, when they scoop up so much obviously private information like addresses and deadnames.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com