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> Kiwi Farms was spun off from CWCiki, a wiki focused on Chris-Chan. They're a forum focused on cyberbullying other people. They especially tend to focus on peo

> Kiwi Farms was spun off from CWCiki, a wiki focused on Chris-Chan. They're a forum focused on cyberbullying other people. They especially tend to focus on people who are in vulnerable groups. For example, Byuu as far as I know, identified as non-binary, which is why they started harassing him. It seems like they're a major catalyst for this situation. Wow. A forum of people that bullies vulnerable people until they kill themselves. As someone who is non-binary and a member of multiple minority groups, this makes me furious. If there's any website that deserves to be DDoSed, this is it. Just saying.

colanderman 5y ago
CloudFlare is providing them DDoS protection.
- winocm 5y ago
  They really need to stop. They did it for 8chan, why not this? How many more people need to die before anything changes?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I'm not endorsing what they do, but Cloudflare isn't the only option for DDOS protection. If you take them out now, you'll probably just send them deeper into the decentralized web, which is probably not a mutually amicable solution.
    - iameli 5y ago
      They well might be, realistically. Other similarly-atrocious sites that were eventually shut down by Cloudflare had a lot of trouble finding new hosts.
      - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
        In addition, the dark web would result in them losing a large portion of their user base, both at the initial switch over, but also over time as existing members leave.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        Decentralized =/= dark web. Who's going to stop them from setting up a Mastodon instance, or making an invite-only Matrix server?
  - jchw 5y ago
    Dear Cloudflare. If you want to take a principled stance, you have to do it unilaterally, and defend it when it is being challenged. You want to be “neutral”? Then take the stance when it actually is being challenged. Otherwise, what you have isn’t a principled stance. It’s a public relations strategy. The moment you made an exception, you proved that you could and would disable a site over its content if you wanted. But when something like this continues to stay online, it proves that you are not actually policing content, but your own reputation. I get that it is genuinely impossible to please everyone. But this is a hypocritical and dishonest stance at best. What we have here is multiple deaths while their harassers run victory laps hiding behind pseudonyms on Cloudflare-protected properties. > we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. I know you guys read Hacker News. Do you want to fucking acknowledge this?
  - blooalien 5y ago
    > "How many more people need to die before anything changes?" I've come to realize that the sad answer to that question is: All the people everywhere… Humanity is a toxic planetary parasite. :(
    - me_me_me 5y ago
      No its not. There are many people that give more then they take, who are always there for others. And there are also sad, damaged people who somehow convinced themselves that to make sense of their suffering they need to hurt others. Internet made them create a 'community' and they feed each-others' hate to create this toxic sewer. But this is outlier. If I walk down my street and ask a stranger to help me move something to the back of my car, they would most likely help. And I am positive they would not just wait there to trip me after refusing to help.
      - blooalien 5y ago
        Sadly, my own personal experience (especially in recent years) is that politics and money appear to be more important to most modern humans than literally anything else; Even human life is worthless if you're on the wrong side of a political line, or your pockets don't contain enough money. At least that seems the case in so-called "developed" nations like the USA.
- qiqitori 5y ago
  You can't provide DDoS protection for the dynamic stuff.
  - oliwarner 5y ago
    You can. When you're as big as cloudflare, you can tell if clients are real people, and filter out bot traffic. If you have any doubts, you can force them through a captcha layer or just deny the traffic.
labster 5y ago
Someone bullied by Kiwi Farms decided to hit back at a forum member there. Said Kiwi also had an account on my wiki farm, so they demanded that I divulge PII about the user or else become a victim of cyber bullying myself. Suffice to say that I decided to enforce the GDPR, and to this day there is an attack page on the internet calling myself and my mother pedophiles because I chose to follow the law. Kiwi Farms is a toxic community where even their own targets are dangerous.
arp242 5y ago
I posted a bit on KiwiFarms a bit about six/seven years ago. I became involved somewhat involuntary as I was editing on RationalWiki at the time and there was rather a lot of conflict with the whole "GamerGate" thing going on, and I had no idea what that was about. I didn't care much for the anti-gamergate people on RW as I felt they were ... unpleasant ... and they kept talking about this "KiwiFarms" thing. So I created an account and figured I'd talk to some people to see what it's all about and hear out the other side a bit. At the time, from what I saw, it wasn't actually so bad. I would consider it distasteful, even offensive at times, but from what I've seen they weren't organizing harassment or bully campaigns. The general attitude was something along the lines of "haha, what a loser/idiot", and in some of the more tragic cases it was also followed up by "but this is very sad to see :-(". I don't recall seeing the targetting of people based on their sexuality or gender identity. The range of opinions on things like GamerGate were fairly diverse, but the main attitude was "petty manchildren crying about muh gamez". Plenty of stuff I disagreed with, and plenty of comments that I would describe as being made in bad taste or downright offensive, but my take-away was that, at the time, the description of a vile nest of horrible reactionary alt-Right bullies as some on RationalWiki claimed it, was pretty off the mark. We had plenty of trolls on RationalWiki for sure, and some pretty vile ones too, and most people on KiwiFarms thought they were just a bunch of losers. Yet, somehow, they were still attributed to KiwiFarms shrug. I don't know the details of the this situation, and it's been six years so all sorts of things could have changed, but based on my previous experience I'm very hesitant to immediately jump to the conclusion that it's a "forum of people that bullies vulnerable people until they kill themselves" because I've seen all sorts of hyperbolic claims before and found them untrue. Maybe it's correct this time, but ... yeah. Fool me once, fool me twice... And if this comment wasn't controversial enough already: I feel this stuff is sometimes taken way too seriously, and that this is actively harmful to people like Near. I completely understand why they would feel upset if people say ugly things about them, but a lot of this crowd seems to provide only validation and recognition for being upset, and not enough "just some rando losers on a forum, get over it and stop crying". I don't think this is helping and an (unintentional) but vicious feedback loop. The fact of the matter is that the world has ugly people saying ugly things. This has always been true for all of history, and will always remain true. It sucks, but we can't change that. You can either shrug at insults or slurs, or you can become very upset with it, and it's absolutely not a given unchangeable fact that "getting upset" is the only possible action. I don't want to put too much weight in this letter as it's obviously written from a place of grief and anger, but it mostly seems to externalize Near's problems to KiwiFarms. It seems to me that their problems were mostly internal, as is usually the case with people suffering from long-term depression. Perhaps the external KiwiFarms "pushed them over the edge", but that's not the same as being the primary cause. This is important because if you focus on the wrong things you're not going to solve whatever problems you have. However, no matter what I say here, or what the facts of the case may be (maybe it is as bad as claimed, maybe not) I think ... none of that will really matter here anyway :-/
RickJWagner 5y ago
It has to start with very public campaigns showing that cyber-bullying just isn't acceptable. So maybe start with Christy Tiegen. Or Chris Evans. Jim Carrey. Some big names. They've all bullied people, including school children.

colanderman 5y ago

CloudFlare is providing them DDoS protection.

winocm 5y ago
They really need to stop. They did it for 8chan, why not this? How many more people need to die before anything changes?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I'm not endorsing what they do, but Cloudflare isn't the only option for DDOS protection. If you take them out now, you'll probably just send them deeper into the decentralized web, which is probably not a mutually amicable solution.
  - iameli 5y ago
    They well might be, realistically. Other similarly-atrocious sites that were eventually shut down by Cloudflare had a lot of trouble finding new hosts.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
      In addition, the dark web would result in them losing a large portion of their user base, both at the initial switch over, but also over time as existing members leave.
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Decentralized =/= dark web. Who's going to stop them from setting up a Mastodon instance, or making an invite-only Matrix server?
- jchw 5y ago
  Dear Cloudflare. If you want to take a principled stance, you have to do it unilaterally, and defend it when it is being challenged. You want to be “neutral”? Then take the stance when it actually is being challenged. Otherwise, what you have isn’t a principled stance. It’s a public relations strategy. The moment you made an exception, you proved that you could and would disable a site over its content if you wanted. But when something like this continues to stay online, it proves that you are not actually policing content, but your own reputation. I get that it is genuinely impossible to please everyone. But this is a hypocritical and dishonest stance at best. What we have here is multiple deaths while their harassers run victory laps hiding behind pseudonyms on Cloudflare-protected properties. > we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. I know you guys read Hacker News. Do you want to fucking acknowledge this?
- blooalien 5y ago
  > "How many more people need to die before anything changes?" I've come to realize that the sad answer to that question is: All the people everywhere… Humanity is a toxic planetary parasite. :(
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    No its not. There are many people that give more then they take, who are always there for others. And there are also sad, damaged people who somehow convinced themselves that to make sense of their suffering they need to hurt others. Internet made them create a 'community' and they feed each-others' hate to create this toxic sewer. But this is outlier. If I walk down my street and ask a stranger to help me move something to the back of my car, they would most likely help. And I am positive they would not just wait there to trip me after refusing to help.
    - blooalien 5y ago
      Sadly, my own personal experience (especially in recent years) is that politics and money appear to be more important to most modern humans than literally anything else; Even human life is worthless if you're on the wrong side of a political line, or your pockets don't contain enough money. At least that seems the case in so-called "developed" nations like the USA.
qiqitori 5y ago
You can't provide DDoS protection for the dynamic stuff.
- oliwarner 5y ago
  You can. When you're as big as cloudflare, you can tell if clients are real people, and filter out bot traffic. If you have any doubts, you can force them through a captcha layer or just deny the traffic.

labster 5y ago

Someone bullied by Kiwi Farms decided to hit back at a forum member there. Said Kiwi also had an account on my wiki farm, so they demanded that I divulge PII about the user or else become a victim of cyber bullying myself. Suffice to say that I decided to enforce the GDPR, and to this day there is an attack page on the internet calling myself and my mother pedophiles because I chose to follow the law. Kiwi Farms is a toxic community where even their own targets are dangerous.

arp242 5y ago

I posted a bit on KiwiFarms a bit about six/seven years ago. I became involved somewhat involuntary as I was editing on RationalWiki at the time and there was rather a lot of conflict with the whole "GamerGate" thing going on, and I had no idea what that was about. I didn't care much for the anti-gamergate people on RW as I felt they were ... unpleasant ... and they kept talking about this "KiwiFarms" thing. So I created an account and figured I'd talk to some people to see what it's all about and hear out the other side a bit. At the time, from what I saw, it wasn't actually so bad. I would consider it distasteful, even offensive at times, but from what I've seen they weren't organizing harassment or bully campaigns. The general attitude was something along the lines of "haha, what a loser/idiot", and in some of the more tragic cases it was also followed up by "but this is very sad to see :-(". I don't recall seeing the targetting of people based on their sexuality or gender identity. The range of opinions on things like GamerGate were fairly diverse, but the main attitude was "petty manchildren crying about muh gamez". Plenty of stuff I disagreed with, and plenty of comments that I would describe as being made in bad taste or downright offensive, but my take-away was that, at the time, the description of a vile nest of horrible reactionary alt-Right bullies as some on RationalWiki claimed it, was pretty off the mark. We had plenty of trolls on RationalWiki for sure, and some pretty vile ones too, and most people on KiwiFarms thought they were just a bunch of losers. Yet, somehow, they were still attributed to KiwiFarms shrug. I don't know the details of the this situation, and it's been six years so all sorts of things could have changed, but based on my previous experience I'm very hesitant to immediately jump to the conclusion that it's a "forum of people that bullies vulnerable people until they kill themselves" because I've seen all sorts of hyperbolic claims before and found them untrue. Maybe it's correct this time, but ... yeah. Fool me once, fool me twice... And if this comment wasn't controversial enough already: I feel this stuff is sometimes taken way too seriously, and that this is actively harmful to people like Near. I completely understand why they would feel upset if people say ugly things about them, but a lot of this crowd seems to provide only validation and recognition for being upset, and not enough "just some rando losers on a forum, get over it and stop crying". I don't think this is helping and an (unintentional) but vicious feedback loop. The fact of the matter is that the world has ugly people saying ugly things. This has always been true for all of history, and will always remain true. It sucks, but we can't change that. You can either shrug at insults or slurs, or you can become very upset with it, and it's absolutely not a given unchangeable fact that "getting upset" is the only possible action. I don't want to put too much weight in this letter as it's obviously written from a place of grief and anger, but it mostly seems to externalize Near's problems to KiwiFarms. It seems to me that their problems were mostly internal, as is usually the case with people suffering from long-term depression. Perhaps the external KiwiFarms "pushed them over the edge", but that's not the same as being the primary cause. This is important because if you focus on the wrong things you're not going to solve whatever problems you have. However, no matter what I say here, or what the facts of the case may be (maybe it is as bad as claimed, maybe not) I think ... none of that will really matter here anyway :-/

RickJWagner 5y ago

It has to start with very public campaigns showing that cyber-bullying just isn't acceptable. So maybe start with Christy Tiegen. Or Chris Evans. Jim Carrey. Some big names. They've all bullied people, including school children.