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Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you.

Cloudflare is an independent entity and is within its rights to refuse service for businesses that are unsavory (including kiwifarms due to supporting harassment, propagandists, illegal substances, or whatever it chooses).

I am surprised radicalized keyboard warriors on the internet feel better about the situation and their lives when they harass, SWAT, and dox others. I am sorry you've experienced this and live in fear of it. It seems out of sync with of principles they tend to mutually adopt from Jordan Peterson and similar. That said, those tend to be a bit of a philosophical mess anyhow.

Maybe it's a little thing, but I hope knowing some random other person on the internet agrees with you, and who doesn't run in the same circles, brings some comfort to you. I applaud you for navigating your identity and looking to live your life to be the best you. It shouldn't have to be in fear. Good luck out there.

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Thank you, it really does help. This post was me releasing my frustration. I've censored myself a lot more than usual throughout kiwifarm's deplatforming, for fear when they regroup they may attack those who were critical of them. I worry I'd be near the top of the list because I'm also trans.

But I don't want them to win by being silent.

Showing basic restraint and not oversharing online seem to be the recipe for not ending up with a thread on Kiwi Farms, so you're probably fine.

This is simply untrue.

EG "I am—well, I was—great at opsec. I got doxxed on farms because someone spent 50+ hours trying to nail me down until he ultimately “compare[d] her tweets to weather history to determine her city, and complied a parametric list of all the profs in nyc and went from there."

I don't see what an out-of-context quote disproves about my hypothesis.

Your assessment that the quote is out-of-context is where the disconnect looks to be.

The OP mentions that they tried to follow good opsec but had an issue, and you mentioned "Showing basic restraint and not oversharing online" as the solution -- which based on OP's opsec comment they looked to follow that.

I still don't know where the quote came from, its context, or if it is a quote in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I am legitimately puzzled by this exchange.

I don't find it puzzling. You're putting the onus of being harassed on OP despite them following what they felt was reasonable opsec, rather than on the people harassing.

At least, that's what your prior comments communicated.

If you paint a giant target on your back while also revealing who and where you are, people that dislike you for whatever reason are going to target you. That is reality and will continue to be reality even without a site like Kiwi Farms.

My initial comment communicated that OP was probably going to be fine. Or not. It's not like I can tell.

Sure, but we have plenty of people who did not paint targets on their back[1], and who didn't reveal who or where they are, and they got doxxed by obsessive trolls at KF. Telling people "you'll be fine, KF won't dox you" is simply untrue for plenty of people who did get doxed.

[1] unless "existing while trans" counts as target-painting.

You not knowing how to use a search engine makes you unqualified to talk about the obsessive use of search engines by KF users.

So your "hypothesis" is that "don't ever post about the weather if you don't want to get harassed and chilling effect'd over being trans" is fine and normal and cool, but "don't run a harassment website if you want to keep free DDOS protection for more than 13 years" is the end of free speech as we know it?

No. Please refrain from putting words into my mouth.

> ...within its rights to refuse service for businesses that are unsavory...

- Labor union organizers and socialists used to be considered unsavory.

- The civil rights movement used to be considered unsavory.

- LGBTQ people used to be considered really unsavory, pre-1970s.

Guess we know what the parent poster and those that agree with them would have said about businesses refusing service to those movements had they been around then.

Your point, even though it is US-centric whataboutism, is quite correct. A private venue that operates as a host has rights to discriminate among whom it hosts. Even more so, "unsavory" here is clearly a placeholder for "legally questionable if not outright banned" rather than "social underdog some people in society feel superior to." Trolls farms are typically anything but social underdogs.

But let's step into your oranges-compared-to-apples example set. What your reductionist, presentist whataboutism misses is that the social "unsavoriness" was eventually seen to be unethical by society writ-large. However, KiwiFarms, as a vehicle for harassment against the ideal American underdogs, hasn't a leg to stand on and will remain as socially (and legally) unsavory.

Therefore, your conclusion, that the OP and those that agree would have refused service universally to Labor, Civil Rights activists and supporters, and LGBTQ, is flawed. Perhaps ironically, the OP and those that agree with the comments are contained in the union of the latter two categories anyhow.

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