zlacker

>>danso+(OP)
This is ridiculous and has been a cascade of awful precedents for the Internet. This is legitimately an extremely bad sign of what's to come for the Internet's future.

>>kadenw+C1
Popular endorsement of harassment to the point of suicide seems like a worse sign, personally.

When it comes to threats to freedom of expression, I'm much more concerned about the religious right's abuse of government authority to censor education, ban books, and suppress the vote, than I am about private institutions taking steps to protect human life.

>>cautho+r2
Private institutions have every right to stand behind whoever they choose. As a user, I have no intention of using Cloudflare because (even as a queer individual) I don't feel safe using a platform that would censor me if enough people were mad enough. I would much rather choose a platform that stands by their TOS as-written, instead of stepping in to arbitrate on a case-by-case basis.

Cloudflare has ever right to open Pandora's Box, but I want nothing to do with it. Much like Namecheap's fumble earlier this year, the way they handled this situation showed their true colors, and made it evident that I don't want to ever do business with them.

>>smolde+l3
OK, but there is literally no business in the universe that won't drop you as a customer if you cause them enough trouble.

>>krapp+W3
You'd think that, but historically this has only encouraged niche businesses to crop up catering to that crowd. Look at Epik (or Vultr) for example, businesses that exist solely to counter this kind of threat. Yes, they still reserve the right to remove abusive users, but that's defined by legal statutes and technical limitations rather than 'icky feelings'. Both services have a surprisingly solid track-record servicing the roughest of customers.

Failing all that, KiwiFarms doesn't need a business to stay afloat. The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network. To stop KiwiFarms from existing, you need to literally silence the people using it, not just shut down their clearnet website. Websites don't harass people, people do.

>>smolde+S4
The same Epik that turned down 8chan? https://www.epik.com/blog/epik-draws-line-on-acceptable-use....

At the end of the day, businesses gotta eat. They're not a charity or a benevolent public force. If your user generated content impacts their bottom line, you're gonna get kicked to the curb.

>The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network

I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor. Both CDNs are primarily concerned about business risk with hosting content and calls to action that could be found illegal.

>>chomp+P9
> The same Epik that turned down 8chan?

Epik hosted 8chan in the interim after Cloudflare dropped them. This cause Epik's hosting provider to drop them, and since Epik doesn't own their datacenters they had to abide by their hardware provider's decision: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/5/20754943/8chan-epik-offlin...

I'll still eat some crow, though; I forgot the entire business was owned by Rob Monster (a veritable idiot by most definitions of the word), and I completely forgot that they even provided hosting in the first place.

> I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor.

I'm certain they don't. That's the problem, though; this moral panic response to KiwiFarms has achieved nothing. Cloudflare knows that this is a zero-sum game, but they bent anyways. As businesses, their choices make plenty of sense. I disagree with businesses all the time though (check the comment history), and frankly I think Cloudflare made the wrong decision here. In my opinion, their actions here will be more destructive to queer populations in the long-run.

>>smolde+Ic
How did it achieve nothing? Deplatforming has shown to be effective. The Nazi site that CF shut down is very difficult to access.

>>mmastr+Gn
It doesn't stop Nazis from existing though (or even knowing about, visiting and supporting the site). If we do the same thing with KiwiFarms, we just make it harder to monitor and easier for serial-abusers to collaborate. The majority of KiwiFarms users simply aren't solely enabled by the website existing, either.

I simply don't believe in deplatforming, and it disappoints me to see Cloudflare shrug and cave in.

>>smolde+cR
> It doesn't stop Nazis from existing though (or even knowing about, visiting and supporting the site).

This approach is making perfect the enemy of good. There is no perfect way to solve this problem.

> If we do the same thing with KiwiFarms, we just make it harder to monitor and easier for serial-abusers to collaborate.

It's still a website, it's still accessible. That part hasn't gone away. If the contention is that launching TOR somehow means it's "harder to monitor" then I have some news for you: Lots of monitoring of darkweb stuff goes on every day.