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.

Decentralized =/= dark web. Who's going to stop them from setting up a Mastodon instance, or making an invite-only Matrix server?

> "How many more people need to die before anything changes?"

I've come to realize that the sad answer to that question is: All the people everywhere… Humanity is a toxic planetary parasite. :(

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.