Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

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Oh, God, I'm being dragged into this debate again.

> There's no such thing as "just words on the internet". Words express beliefs and intent. I take them seriously.

Intent? Find me a post on KF stating intent to harm someone in real life which wasn't either downvoted or promptly deleted. Go ahead.

> Of course. The sort of people that compile elaborate profiles on people including personal information are some sort of enlightened beings that despite obsessively tracking down and compiling every embarrassing or weird thing about another person would never actually use that information for anything at all.

Create an alt account on KF and post in a lolcow's thread saying that you want to harm that person in real life. You'll be downvoted into oblivion, probably banned, possibly doxed if you used the same username as you use elsewhere, and possibly reported to law enforcement.

You can believe what you're told by people with motivation to lie, or you can discover the truth. Up to you.

> Intent? Find me a post on KF stating intent to harm someone in real life which wasn't either downvoted or promptly deleted. Go ahead.

Are you new to online communities? I've been a core member of several for years.

There's always politics, admin only channels, and people contacting each other outside the main system. Sometimes multiple levels, like two admins talking in private, then adding a third, then bringing it into the admin channel, then breaking the news into the main community.

In communities where there's external attacks, or a concern with reputation, the people in charge typically take that seriously. It's very possible that something is publicly forbidden, but with the right contacts you can find the right people.

> Create an alt account on KF and post in a lolcow's thread saying that you want to harm that person in real life.

Which is unsurprising because formerly kiwifarms used traditional hosting, and had to at least keep some plausible deniability. But everyone knows what all that stuff they post is for.

> You'll be downvoted into oblivion, probably banned, possibly doxed if you used the same username as you use elsewhere, and possibly reported to law enforcement.

Sure, and if you know the right people on the right Discord, then you can avoid all that and discuss all the plans and share all the juicy news away from prying eyes.

Besides which, the info is public. Anyone can act on it without being a member, or having any agreement on anything with people posting there.

> There's always politics, admin only channels, and people contacting each other outside the main system.

Okay, so KF is responsible for conversations that happen outside of KF now? What should KF's admins do about that?

> Sure, and if you know the right people on the right Discord, then you can avoid all that and discuss all the plans and share all the juicy news away from prying eyes.

Take that up with Discord, then.

> Okay, so KF is responsible for conversations that happen outside of KF now?

No, I mean that any organization is more than what it presents publicly. The people that own KF, and the people that post on it are going to have more ways to talk to each other than to post on public threads.

> Take that up with Discord, then.

No, I take it up with the people who use Discord to this end first of all. And with Discord second, of course, if they know that's going on there and allow it.

They post contact information, links to profiles where the user can be contacted, and so on, right? If so, they're complicit in whatever people do with that information, even if they don't talk about it on the forums.

I think that is a fair line of reasoning.

Most online forums have rules against doxing. Then again, most online forums have problems with anonymous users making false claims.

Is wikipedia likewise complicit for publishing articles on nefarious topics? How about linking to macdonalds.com, who is surely complicit in more deaths than kiwifarms?

Sure, it's also complicit, but the cost-benefit analysis favors Wikipedia, whereas KF has a much higher bar of utlity to clear because it's publishing information that would be trivial to use to hurt specific individuals. What value could KF provide that's worth that pain? I don't think there's any.

> it's publishing information that would be trivial to use to hurt specific individuals

But so do a lot of organizations. It's legal for kiwifarms' users and it's legal for the phone company, the federal election commission and for my city government too.

> What value could KF provide that's worth that pain? I don't think there's any.

What pain, exactly though? People claim that there have been suicides, but the claims seem dubious at best. If you call someone out for misappropriating funds and they commit suicide, is that on you?

What value? Many reporters (and regular humans) use kiwifarms to get a sense of the history, backstories and relationships of online figures and groups.

By that logic, if someone uses a phone book to harass you via telephone, the phone company is liable.

Or, for a more up-to-date example, if someone uses a DNS provider to find a server's IP address and do a DDOS attack against it (as is constantly happening to KF), the DNS provider would be liable.

The phone book and DNS provider are different because they don't say why one would want to harass those people, whereas on KF that information is provided along with their contact info.

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