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Null has taken down threads. The number one reason he does not is that the users will immediately notice and just put the information back up, and while he could of course ban the users for doing that, it just paints a big Streisand-mansion-sized target on it, completely backfiring any attempt to remove it.
Quietly delisting and then deleting a thread that has been dead for a while was likely to work and Null might have done it, especially because Near was offering a big pile of cash. But in the middle of talking Near said "fuck it I am killing myself" and then ghosted the world.
Agreed. One of the things that kind of baffles me about the incident was how Near negotiated with Null, or rather, didn't.
If I was him, I wouldn't have opened with a gambit like "take my $120,000 and delete the thread or I kill myself". That shows your cards too early, that makes it sound like you preplanned this and are hoping to be able to strong-arm him into doing it, and it provides a game-theoretic reason for him to say no (because you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists and you shouldn't negotiate with extreme demands like that).
Secondly, as Null would say on his podcast later, he kind of didn't get why a dead 13-page thread was so harmful to him. One of the things Near said was that a friend of ten years left him, and Null was like "so instead of being mad at them, you come to me for it?" Honestly, I'm still not sure why that thread was so bad to him even if he was actually dead. Other threads on the site allege that people have molested children, abused animals, done all sorts of horrible things (and none of them have attempted or faked suicide) and yet the worst that could be said in Near's thread was that he defended Christopher Handley (a man convicted of possession of drawn child pornography) 12 years ago before he recanted it and said it was a stupid thing of him to have done. There's various conspiracy theories that speculate he faked his death to avoid potential legal action from Nintendo for his emulator development or something, but there's really no evidence for them either and it would still be baffling for him to have done this.
And thirdly, he waited 12 hours after Null's last reply before citing some unknown time limit(?) and deciding to follow through with his plan while Null had (assumedly) gone to bed. To this day I still have no idea what that was about. He didn't even use the time limit as a negotiation chip because he never told him about it.
All of this is to say that if I was in this situation, I probably would have done my homework and figured out the best way to persuade him, and only offer money if things seemed to be going south. But not $120,000 all at once; I'd start with $5,000 at the most. And I wouldn't threaten suicide or institute an arbitrary time limit or anything. If the thread couldn't get taken down then, well, my BATNA is to just get off the internet (or at least social media) at that point.
Suicidal people tend to not be making good decisions. [citation needed] And that awful people don't kill themselves doesn't actually change how decent people consider the same allegations beyond the pale, or a very serious matter.
More broadly, there's still remaining archives of parts the byuu/near thread, and there's random allegations of shota stuff before you hit double digits. You or I may not particularly care about "Joe Biden's Left Testicle" making unfounded allegations, but combined with (alleged!) calls to friends and family, would not be the best way to work with someone that the posters already thought was crazy and hysterical.
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I think Near was hoping for a narrative of "I even offered 100K and they still said it was not enough." When Josh started negotiating in earnest, Near panicked.
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