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KF's concept of “large public show” has very little connection to reality. No matter how small a target tries to make their audience, they are not guaranteed to

KF's concept of “large public show” has very little connection to reality. No matter how small a target tries to make their audience, they are not guaranteed to escape harassment. Like on a school playground, the bullies pick on people who are unpopular.

smoldesu 4y ago
Correct, and as an unpopular person myself (just ask around), I'm saying that the status quo is fine. The alternative is simply too dangerous to consider, particularly for queer communities that rely on the good graces of internet freedom to communicate within hostile regimes. Setting this precedent could very well encourage other countries to strongarm service providers into dropping customers, or worse yet lead to astroturfing that takes down perfectly innocent messageboards. What happens when China tries to claim that GitHub is hosting content that's highly offensive to Chinese citizens? Does Microsoft bend? This is not the kind of war we want to fight. Cloudflare has a right to make whatever choices they want, but the ramifications of their choice are going to be felt for the next decade. My opinion is that they made the wrong decision, but only time will tell who's right here.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  I wonder how many people remember when the censorship online was wielded against queer people? Lots of writing sites in the 90s wouldn't host any queer lit, for example, and being gay on main (in non-queer spaces) was...not advised. I also wonder how the percentages of queer people for and against platforming KF would shake out depending on how old they are and how long they've been online?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Maybe it's not my place to speculate, but I think the modern generation of TikTok queers and image-obsessed teens has completely forgotten that social media only gives them a platform because they profit off every like and view. If the shoe was on the other foot (say, they were trying to increase profits in queer-hostile countries) they would have no problem silencing your voice just to increase user retention. This already happens on TikTok, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also happened on Twitter and Facebook, to lesser extents. A sad allegory for the state of queer solidarity in 2022, I guess. Again though, that's just speculation. You're absolutely correct that the consensus has changed though; the mindset has shifted from 'freedom through anonymity' to 'strength in numbers'. Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      > Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point. Give it 10 years. Twitter will be the new Facebook. Only for old, uncool people. I'm already starting to see the swing back. Although it's fascinating how much the algorithms push this stuff. TikTok keeps trying to show me stuff about trans issues. I. Don't. Care. At least not on TIKTOK.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      Of course corporations would crush queer people if it made them money. But defending KF won't change that one bit. The error is assuming that the people who'd treat gay people so badly would be swayed one bit by "well, we didn't get cloudflare to take down that forum full of bigots."
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        I don't want them to be swayed, I want them to be able to speak their (wrong) ideas. It's fine if people want to spread lies about gay people, or even engage in hateful harassment campaigns. Homophobic violence is where I draw the line, but we have hate crimes explicitly designed for deterring and prosecuting these offenses. Everything else, in my opinion, falls under the purview of fair expression. Obviously Cloudflare doesn't have any obligation to serve them, but that's not going to stop them from continuing their harassment campaigns. It just pushes them onto more esoteric, resilient platforms. The internet is balanced when the most radical of queer voices are given equal opportunity as the most radical traditional perspectives. I don't care how badly it hurts anyone's feelings, if we end up making this a personal crusade then nobody wins. Violence begets violence, and the cycle gets escalated even further.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Plenty of us remember. We also don't believe that protecting KF is in any way going to prevent those sorts of threats against the speech and association of queer groups online.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      For the record, I think CF and everybody else are well within their rights to drop KF, and the place is a cesspit. I'm very firmly 'Team Nobody' here. And I'm sure that there are other queer people who've been online as long as we have that agree with you. I'm a nerd who was genuinely wondering if we'd see a correlation between 'time online/age' and 'approval of speech regulation'. As in I'd love to do a formal study on something like that. I just want to know things. Which of us is the outlier? Would it be a bimodal distribution? And I can definitely see your point, that the type of people who want to censor queer content aren't going to stop wanting that no matter what we do. Especially the religious ones.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        I don't think we would. This just feels to me like a classic "young people disagree with me" narrative that is so easy to create in one's mind. If anything, I'd expect the folks who've been around long enough to really see the state use its power to absolutely crush queer people with brutal violence against its own longstanding stated principles to be more aware that this isn't the sort of trade you can make.
        smoldesu 4y ago
        Did you ever use IRC? I think about the conversations that went on in #freenode, and compared to the Discord servers I see today their discussions are absolutely sterile. "Off topic" channels in Discord servers tend to amount to rigorously moderated firehoses of memes and benign discourse, compared to IRC's loosely-attended miasma of porno, MTV music videos and 3-hour long conference talks. You might be able to argue that the signal:noise ratio improved over the years, but people's idea of netiquette certainly changed along with it. Hell, don't take my word for it. Take a trip down the Linux emailing lists of the past few decades and compare them today. People would probably boycott Linux if kernel developers still fought like they did in the 90s...
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  "Hey, remember how we left up that hate website" isn't going to convince any authoritarian regime to treat gay people with respect. The history of oppression is littered with examples of legal protections simply not being granted to oppressed groups and I'd fully expect such an authority to just continue on crushing gay people beneath its heel regardless of how KF was dealt with.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I agree with everything you said, but that's only because none of it addressed anything I said. Authoritarian regimes will always have reason to hate anyone outside the standard model of a citizen. Our concept of internet freedom and service neutrality is what helps these oppressed people connect and share their stories. This already happened in the 90s, where LGBT BBS' and messageboards gave like-minded people places to reach out with each other. Later, this gave rise to platforms like Vice News and dozens of other media outlets that could freely report on queer topics without fear of persecution. In this particular instance, I think Keffals was wrong. She poured gasoline on a fire, and then blamed the fire for not putting itself out. That doesn't make KiwiFarms right, but it does prevent me from sympathizing with her.
jessaustin 4y ago
So, they pick on Russians and Islamic fundamentalists? Labor organizers? Democratically elected socialist leaders in Latin America? Or maybe Julian Assange? Oh wait, they must pick on poor people! If any of that has been the case, then good riddance. Somehow one doubts that.

smoldesu 4y ago

Correct, and as an unpopular person myself (just ask around), I'm saying that the status quo is fine. The alternative is simply too dangerous to consider, particularly for queer communities that rely on the good graces of internet freedom to communicate within hostile regimes. Setting this precedent could very well encourage other countries to strongarm service providers into dropping customers, or worse yet lead to astroturfing that takes down perfectly innocent messageboards. What happens when China tries to claim that GitHub is hosting content that's highly offensive to Chinese citizens? Does Microsoft bend? This is not the kind of war we want to fight. Cloudflare has a right to make whatever choices they want, but the ramifications of their choice are going to be felt for the next decade. My opinion is that they made the wrong decision, but only time will tell who's right here.

Mezzie 4y ago
I wonder how many people remember when the censorship online was wielded against queer people? Lots of writing sites in the 90s wouldn't host any queer lit, for example, and being gay on main (in non-queer spaces) was...not advised. I also wonder how the percentages of queer people for and against platforming KF would shake out depending on how old they are and how long they've been online?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Maybe it's not my place to speculate, but I think the modern generation of TikTok queers and image-obsessed teens has completely forgotten that social media only gives them a platform because they profit off every like and view. If the shoe was on the other foot (say, they were trying to increase profits in queer-hostile countries) they would have no problem silencing your voice just to increase user retention. This already happens on TikTok, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also happened on Twitter and Facebook, to lesser extents. A sad allegory for the state of queer solidarity in 2022, I guess. Again though, that's just speculation. You're absolutely correct that the consensus has changed though; the mindset has shifted from 'freedom through anonymity' to 'strength in numbers'. Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    > Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point. Give it 10 years. Twitter will be the new Facebook. Only for old, uncool people. I'm already starting to see the swing back. Although it's fascinating how much the algorithms push this stuff. TikTok keeps trying to show me stuff about trans issues. I. Don't. Care. At least not on TIKTOK.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Of course corporations would crush queer people if it made them money. But defending KF won't change that one bit. The error is assuming that the people who'd treat gay people so badly would be swayed one bit by "well, we didn't get cloudflare to take down that forum full of bigots."
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      I don't want them to be swayed, I want them to be able to speak their (wrong) ideas. It's fine if people want to spread lies about gay people, or even engage in hateful harassment campaigns. Homophobic violence is where I draw the line, but we have hate crimes explicitly designed for deterring and prosecuting these offenses. Everything else, in my opinion, falls under the purview of fair expression. Obviously Cloudflare doesn't have any obligation to serve them, but that's not going to stop them from continuing their harassment campaigns. It just pushes them onto more esoteric, resilient platforms. The internet is balanced when the most radical of queer voices are given equal opportunity as the most radical traditional perspectives. I don't care how badly it hurts anyone's feelings, if we end up making this a personal crusade then nobody wins. Violence begets violence, and the cycle gets escalated even further.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Plenty of us remember. We also don't believe that protecting KF is in any way going to prevent those sorts of threats against the speech and association of queer groups online.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    For the record, I think CF and everybody else are well within their rights to drop KF, and the place is a cesspit. I'm very firmly 'Team Nobody' here. And I'm sure that there are other queer people who've been online as long as we have that agree with you. I'm a nerd who was genuinely wondering if we'd see a correlation between 'time online/age' and 'approval of speech regulation'. As in I'd love to do a formal study on something like that. I just want to know things. Which of us is the outlier? Would it be a bimodal distribution? And I can definitely see your point, that the type of people who want to censor queer content aren't going to stop wanting that no matter what we do. Especially the religious ones.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      I don't think we would. This just feels to me like a classic "young people disagree with me" narrative that is so easy to create in one's mind. If anything, I'd expect the folks who've been around long enough to really see the state use its power to absolutely crush queer people with brutal violence against its own longstanding stated principles to be more aware that this isn't the sort of trade you can make.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        Did you ever use IRC? I think about the conversations that went on in #freenode, and compared to the Discord servers I see today their discussions are absolutely sterile. "Off topic" channels in Discord servers tend to amount to rigorously moderated firehoses of memes and benign discourse, compared to IRC's loosely-attended miasma of porno, MTV music videos and 3-hour long conference talks. You might be able to argue that the signal:noise ratio improved over the years, but people's idea of netiquette certainly changed along with it. Hell, don't take my word for it. Take a trip down the Linux emailing lists of the past few decades and compare them today. People would probably boycott Linux if kernel developers still fought like they did in the 90s...
UncleMeat 4y ago
"Hey, remember how we left up that hate website" isn't going to convince any authoritarian regime to treat gay people with respect. The history of oppression is littered with examples of legal protections simply not being granted to oppressed groups and I'd fully expect such an authority to just continue on crushing gay people beneath its heel regardless of how KF was dealt with.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I agree with everything you said, but that's only because none of it addressed anything I said. Authoritarian regimes will always have reason to hate anyone outside the standard model of a citizen. Our concept of internet freedom and service neutrality is what helps these oppressed people connect and share their stories. This already happened in the 90s, where LGBT BBS' and messageboards gave like-minded people places to reach out with each other. Later, this gave rise to platforms like Vice News and dozens of other media outlets that could freely report on queer topics without fear of persecution. In this particular instance, I think Keffals was wrong. She poured gasoline on a fire, and then blamed the fire for not putting itself out. That doesn't make KiwiFarms right, but it does prevent me from sympathizing with her.

jessaustin 4y ago

So, they pick on Russians and Islamic fundamentalists? Labor organizers? Democratically elected socialist leaders in Latin America? Or maybe Julian Assange? Oh wait, they must pick on poor people! If any of that has been the case, then good riddance. Somehow one doubts that.