It might be more like stalking, but one could also argue that writing a hit piece in a mainstream publication is also stalking as it could intimidate the target.
This is not the kind of war we want to fight. Cloudflare has a right to make whatever choices they want, but the ramifications of their choice are going to be felt for the next decade. My opinion is that they made the wrong decision, but only time will tell who's right here.
Lots of writing sites in the 90s wouldn't host any queer lit, for example, and being gay on main (in non-queer spaces) was...not advised.
I also wonder how the percentages of queer people for and against platforming KF would shake out depending on how old they are and how long they've been online?
Again though, that's just speculation. You're absolutely correct that the consensus has changed though; the mindset has shifted from 'freedom through anonymity' to 'strength in numbers'. Neither thought process was particularly healthy, but the witch-hunting mentality of contemporary online discourse is bound to end at some point.
Give it 10 years. Twitter will be the new Facebook. Only for old, uncool people.
I'm already starting to see the swing back.
Although it's fascinating how much the algorithms push this stuff. TikTok keeps trying to show me stuff about trans issues. I. Don't. Care. At least not on TIKTOK.
The internet is balanced when the most radical of queer voices are given equal opportunity as the most radical traditional perspectives. I don't care how badly it hurts anyone's feelings, if we end up making this a personal crusade then nobody wins. Violence begets violence, and the cycle gets escalated even further.
And I'm sure that there are other queer people who've been online as long as we have that agree with you. I'm a nerd who was genuinely wondering if we'd see a correlation between 'time online/age' and 'approval of speech regulation'. As in I'd love to do a formal study on something like that. I just want to know things. Which of us is the outlier? Would it be a bimodal distribution?
And I can definitely see your point, that the type of people who want to censor queer content aren't going to stop wanting that no matter what we do. Especially the religious ones.
Hell, don't take my word for it. Take a trip down the Linux emailing lists of the past few decades and compare them today. People would probably boycott Linux if kernel developers still fought like they did in the 90s...
I'm saying that I have zero confidence in the state or broader society to actually hold consistent principles when it comes to the treatment of oppressed minorities and that defending KF won't help one iota if the state decides to attack gay people and that the older generation of gay people know this very deeply since their original oppression by the state was not done in accordance to it's supposed principles.
This has nothing to do with internet forums of the past being full of unmoderated noisy content.
In this particular instance, I think Keffals was wrong. She poured gasoline on a fire, and then blamed the fire for not putting itself out. That doesn't make KiwiFarms right, but it does prevent me from sympathizing with her.
Sounds like you've internalized the idea that it's OK to be a punching bag for other people and if you retaliate when attacked that makes you a bad person. This is your right of course, but why should anyone else feel obliged to subscribe to your moral/risk calculus?
Those aren't playground rules. Playground rules are that you fight back and it ends, or you take it and it goes on forever.
For a standard school bully, if you're a big enough problem for the bully they move on to an easier target. Even if you fight back and lose, the bully is far more likely to move on to another target that doesn't pose a response damage risk to them (the only way that isn't true, is if you're entirely unable to pose any physical threat to them, then they may be amused by the attempt to fight back).
This has very little in common with how playground rules work.
I don't think any fight has ever stopped once someone else starts throwing punches, certainly not on KiwiFarms. The only thing they care about is how you react. If you start getting mad on Twitter, then they'll take the fight to Twitter. If you start a public campaign to take them down, the users will obviously take it personally. If you reached out to the police and talked with a therapist/loved one... what would they do? In the hyper-sensational age though, the only response anyone wants is to make an eye-opening TikTok for their 15 seconds of fame... so long as they aren't hated, that sort of fame is obviously verboten.
My goal isn't to take a shot for KiwiFarms or blame the victims here. I'm simply expressing that, as a queer person, I prefer to live in a world where KiwiFarms is allowed to exist. It's a horrible place populated by increasingly toxic people, but without it the internet lacks balance. Without websites like KiwiFarms, it's hard to feel secure hosting anything that others are allowed to use. On the other side of that coin, the people lobbying against KiwiFarms are largely stationed on centralized platforms. They're encouraging a future where all of our communication is commodified and owned by private interests. Maybe it is too late to save the internet, but I'll be the last one to adopt the fatalist mindset that everything requires direct moderation.
Honestly, this is a myth. One day, I decided to follow the "stand up to the bullies and they'll leave you alone" stuff my mother sprouted off. It started with two on two. Two bullies were threatening me and my mate, and I said to my mate we should stand up to them and they'll leave us alone. My mate decided to run. The bullies chased after him. I decided to stop the bullies and stood in there way. What happened over the course of 5-10 minutes was me standing up to these bullies, every time someone they knew came along they asked for help, eventually it was something silly like 10 of them versus me. I'm not too sure of the number because eventually someone jumped me from behind and I was beated until I was out cold. I was found by some girls who then told Janitor that I was dead. That Janitor then came to where they said I was and saw me not moving and thought I was dead. He had the unpleasurable experience of thinking he just found a 10-year old kid dead in a school hallway.
I stood up to every bully. I beat every single one of them up at some point. One bully left the school because of a beating I gave him. You know what changed? Nothing until i started dealing with them differently. Once I started acting like I couldn't care less they stopped their taunting and name calling and all the other stuff that I would beat them up for.