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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44935 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Let's kick this CW thread off with a discussion of the KiwiFarms attacks. Broad strokes include:

CloudFlare posted just yesterday on how they were turning off KiwiFarms use of their DDOS protection. This was 4 days after their post attempting to explain their "abuse policies" and how they would respond to such things, a casual reading of which would suggest that they would not do this. Their claimed justification for this was "potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site". They did not detail exactly what acts and threats were posted and the nature of the site moderator's response.

KiwiFarms is back up at https://kiwifarms.ru/ (note that this is somewhat spotty, they are still actively under attack) (https://archive.ph/2tS7Y should work if their site is not responding at the moment). The site admin has created a post here in which he lists the user and post that he suspects was the trigger for this, the reasons why he thinks the post was suspicious, and the actions the admins took in response, which included banning the user in about half an hour.

To me this looks like a flop on CloudFlare's part. KiwiFarms may or may not be honest in their explanation post, but it's a lot more detail than anyone's posted on the "ban it" side on exactly what were the posts of concern.

To kinda tie it back to this site, I feel like we could easily gain the same level of harassment just for hosting wrongthink, but the only reason we haven't is because we have stricter standards on behavior and we write long and nuanced posts that are hard to take out of context (compare Kiwi Farms which, while they might not harass people themselves, will routinely dox people who have no opsec). Still, though, there are already communities dedicated to do, well, exactly that - take nuanced posts out of context and paint us all as some sort of menace to society. But Kiwi Farms is a good example of what a completely legal site needs to do if it wants to stay up. Null has had to move hosts and VPSes countless times, move domain registrars, spend thousands of dollars on hardware and DDoS mitigation, move to Ukraine (and later Serbia) to reduce personal expenses, hire lawyers and pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to fight several frivolous lawsuits, and do it all while he's been banned for most of the time from using Visa and Mastercard. The site's history is a harrowing tale of what harassment mobs can do if they just yell at someone for long enough, and I hope we never have to go down that path. We've already had to move off of /r/SlateStarCodex and now even our own subreddit due to the increasing tension of people who just can't stand living in the same world with people whose speech they don't like.

For the same reason we outlived most wrong think subs on reddit we're fairly safe. We just aren't a big enough community for the media to bother with and if the media isn't going to bother then the pressure can only be so great. We can get pushed off reddit because the enemies of open discussions were deeply entrenched in the moderation and admin levels of reddit and they were already doing housekeeping of wrong think bastions at which point all that our enemies need to do is keep reminding the admins of our existence. The wider nets is much more decentralized.

It seems the media will care if the people at large view the culture as offensive enough. Some bait subs from rdrama have gotten the attention of admins with as few as ~60 people. https://tracingwoodgrains.substack.com/p/how-one-tight-knit-circle-of-internet

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