They’re one of the biggest forces to have ever existed in emulation, pushing forward accuracy when other emulators were made just to be good enough to play a game, as well as archiving countless rare games. A true legend and they will be missed.
I'm half hoping the tech community bands together over this and shows Kiwi Farms that they poked the wrong beehive. I wish first and foremost all the KW bullies involved with this are tracked down, doxxed, and put through the US (or whatever their country of origin is) legal ringer. Additionally I wouldn't mind if KW itself is pwned by some Lulzsec type group.
This is incredibly saddening news, near was an active HN user whose posts I always enjoyed reading. These cyber stalking websites needed to be shut down long ago.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
They well might be, realistically. Other similarly-atrocious sites that were eventually shut down by Cloudflare had a lot of trouble finding new hosts.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-/
There are literal celebratory posts over someones suicide on there.
They reposted the Christchurch massacre video and the owner called the NZ police fags when requested for logs. Even if your opinion is ‘freedom of information’, the owner being outright offensive to the staff involved in responding to the content is a pretty good indicator that the site is a cesspit.
Being edgy is not the same as intentionally driving people to suicide. Like I said: distasteful and offensive? Sure. But that's not what's being alleged here. Any and all nuance is lost here and the worst possible assumptions are being made.
Near attributes the owner of the site as a key cause of their suicide. It sounds like they made efforts to contact the website to remove the offending threads. Did you even read the article?
Yes, of course I read it. And I found the email exchange with Null and them as well, the letter their friend wrote, some other things on Twitter, this HN thread, the other HN thread, skimmed a bit on that KiwiFarms thread.
There was a fairly short thread with a bunch of people not being very nice, but that's about it, then nothing for a year, and then Near came back with "I will give you my life savings if you remove the thread", which then escalated to essentially "I will kill myself if you don't remove the thread", and a day later they did.
And while I every reason to believe it's all genuine, ... that doesn't automatically mean every claim is true. If I were to say "my conversation with hsbauauvhabzb on HN made me commit suicide" then I might be very sincere and genuine in this, but that doesn't mean you did anything wrong, and even if you did, doesn't mean that you singularly caused my suicide.
I've heard all of this before and when I went out to verify and found that a that time much of it wasn't true, and that a lot of things attributed to KiwiFarms were just not related to them at all. And now I can't really find anything either. Distasteful, offensive, and often just outright shitty? Sure. Intentionally driving people to suicide? Not seeing it. Being shitty is not the same as harassment. It's just not. It's just a bunch of losers dramawanking.
Repeated or organised ‘harassment’ is called bullying.
Bullying is a well accepted cause of suicide. It might not occur straight away, maybe the victim becomes mentally or emotionally unstable as a result and terminates their life some time after the actual events occur. I fail to see a distinctive difference between ‘driving somebody to suicide’ and ‘bullying without the intent to cause suicide’.
But sure, downplay it as ‘dramawanking’ because you’re unable to empathise or see perspectives other than your own.
This does not engage with anything I actually I've said, and you are unfairly putting words in my mouth as I never said "bullying without the intent to cause suicide", or implied anything even close to that, not did I claim that harassment is not bullying. I strongly resent this and I think your comment is extremely unfair.
And then...
> you’re unable to empathise or see perspectives other than your own.
... it gets even worse ... "Agree with my take or you're a monster". Sigh...
> that doesn't mean you did anything wrong, and even if you did, doesn't mean that you singularly caused my suicide.
I means, if you kept saying what he did was wrong, that what he did pushed multiple people to suicide in the past, and that you went as far as offering your life saving in hope to make it stop.... and he kept going... I kind of think he did something wrong and he is responsible.
Once you are aware of how you hurt someone, and you keep doing it knowing that... well yeah you are responsible for that damage, even if in other cases it doesn't hurt.
All of this is way beyond that too. Theses kinds of forums dehumanize people, and that's where it goes too far. Sure Near could have avoided KiwiFarms, but once someone has been dehumanized, once he is no longer someone, but just a joke, it's easy to keep going once you are outside of there. Maybe a huge majority of the members keep it on the forum only (doubt it, but possible), but for sure a some use that as fuel to keep going.
What about all the doxing too? I have an hard time seeing how you could justify that.
What @geofft said. Several stories of Near's passing with many comments were on the front page, but got deduped with the oldest which was not on the front page, and did not get bumped up in ranking accordingly.
It briefly got to #2 but was deduped with other posts from earlier that hadn't gotten many comments. I guess that makes the algorithm count comments relative to the original timestamp and it fell to page two.
What a tragedy. I've been very fortunate to be part of the SMW romhacks community for a few years, and have seen bsnes used heavily over that time. It's so sad to hear this news. There are a few prominent figures in the romhacks community who are notably trans, and the community is so welcoming and kind - I've never even really seen it come up during streams or other interactions, they're just a person doing things and it's a non-issue. I had hoped that things were improving, and that the world was starting to shift to be more accepting, but I know it's a slow process. Too slow for Near. What a loss. We have to do better.
KF itself has been around for nearly a decade, and some of their targets had been harassed by members of KF for years prior to founding a dedicated website. There might be kids on KF, but the average user is firmly in the adult demographic.
> I just don't understand the mentality of people to do this and not feel remorse.
It's a mentality of dehumanization: their targets, in their eyes, deserve less than the basic dignity we give to human beings. That capacity for dehumanization stems from years of indoctrination in reactionary communities.
I think for many people in communities like this, it's easy to just place the blame on the rest of the community. If dozens of people are participating, they don't think their actions count for much.
As for the people running the site, I don't know, they are just cruel.
One interesting metric I think might be rate of psychopathy of KF users, since a forum dedicated to discussing (read: mocking) people seems to me like it would naturally attract people who revel in schadenfreude.
You can’t put any weight into what people on the internet think of you. Especially if you have no real life support to buoy you against the never ending torrent of free abuse available if you go looking for it.
Be weird, do your own thing for your own reasons and let that be enough.
The biggest problem with KF, as I see it, isn’t really what they do and say. Most of what they do is quote people, and most of what they say is snappy, mean quips about the quotes. I’m sure there have been incidents when forum members escalated further, but it’s not their usual MO.
The problem is that they specifically select targets based on how they react. The more a target obsesses over their own thread or responds emotionally to what KF posts about them, the more KF focuses attention on them. So KF’s favorite targets who get the most abuse are going to be exactly those who are least equipped to handle it.
Humans have a wide range of emotional response curves. Sometimes they're really steep and being harassed is an absolute nightmare of highs and lows. This is called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) in neurodivergent discourse.
I will never understand the type of self-destructive attacks that drive this. I don't agree with but can understand the logic of attacking some public figure, but one of your own? An anti-establishment, anti-intellectual property nerd? The driving force behind one of the most impressive emulators on the planet? Even if you hate LGBT people you can't ignore it in the case of someone who's doing free work that directly benefits you?
It’s easy to start thinking that the bullies are bullying because of behaviors, identities, or politics they don’t agree with.
But ultimately many of us have strong feelings on many things, yet still possess the empathy to care about the well-being of those we disagree with.
In my experience, bullies may use a certain external “vector” to bully others, but they do so because of their own internal issues that they choose to deal with by inflicting pain on others by exploiting those vectors.
In some cases this might be anti-LGBTQ, in others it might be classist, or really any place someone can find and exploit a weakness [1] in someone else.
At that point, it doesn’t matter if the person you’re bullying is somebody “on your side”, because it’s not really about the surface issue to begin with.
Unfortunately it makes situations like this even harder to deal with, because it’s not just a matter of trying to impart empathy on the bully.
[1] which is not to imply any identity is necessarily a weakness, but rather may be something a person struggles with personally and therefore provides an opening for someone else to exploit.
>Byuu as far as I know, identified as non-binary, which is why they started harassing him.
Previously this comment contained an ill-mannered correction of the mistaken pronoun usage. However, this is completely unnecessary so I will replace it with this message, and a reminder that Near used they/them pronouns. Apologies.
Regardless, that was absolutely not my intention. I meant to highlight the pronoun misuse because I've seen a handful of comments here misgendering them, and it's really sad to see that happening to someone who just passed.
My apologies if it came across as rude or tone-deaf. I attempted to edit after but I am on a mobile client that doesn't support it, nor even deleting comments.
I’ve always been curious, is this intentional correcting of seemingly innocent mistakes actually something that non-cis people care about? There’s asshole intentional misgendering and there are legitimate accidents, which can be a slip of the tongue (I regularly misgender people accidentally, despite wanting to be respectful, I put it down to many decades of cis programming which I now need to undo).
As a gay man I’m more than used to people assuming I’m straight, I don’t speak for all gay men but the consensus in our circle is to politely correct but not get obnoxious, I would guess other queer demographics would be similar.
>is this intentional correcting of seemingly innocent mistakes actually something that non-cis people care about?
By care about, do you mean "do they want it to be done" or "do they mind if it's done"?
I have trans friends who have asked me in the past to correct people on their behalf privately because they don't want to make a big deal out of it. I do believe it was an innocent mistake.
It's possible to be nonbinary and use any variety of pronouns. However, the letter from Near's friend used they/them, so that's probably the right set.
