I've spent a lot of mental energy in the past few weeks angry at the MSM for their coverage of the controversy. I also feel like I've taken crazy pills hearing that a site I have frequented is full of actual, real life terrorists and somehow I just never noticed. Thank you, Jesse, for being willing to take a look at what the site is.
Maybe I'm just old and tired but I remember when the internet was the wild west. Kiwis still has that atmosphere. Take a wrong turn down a dark alley and you're reading about "smashed and slammed" pit bulls or seeing graphic botched SRS photos.
I don't think you can talk about it without talking about what the rest of the internet has become.
Facebook not only censors what you can say, but if you mention something like Covid, it will put a helpful link at the bottom of your post so you can go educate (clap) yourself (clap) about how getting your toddler vaccinated against a disease that literally one toddler in the US has died from is right and good. I feel the need to state here that I am by no means a coof foil-hatter and I am triple vaxxed, but the last two jabs kicked my ass and pretending that getting a jab is a totally harmless thing to do is laughable.
Discussion sites that used to support lively debates are now just a bunch of people agreeing with each other. Look at the discussion on Democratic Underground about the Supreme Court and Yeshiva. Obviously any person who claims that sodomy is against their religion is just being homophobic for no reason so you need to educate (clap) yourself (clap). Again, I am a friend of the gays, but pretending that there is no conflict between religious belief and modern views about sexuality is deluded.
As a third example, very few papers support comments sections where people can discuss what the article says. I understand that these comments sections were often a peanut gallery of heckling and slapfights, but reading other people's views on the topic de jour often sharpened my thinking about something. I live in an area that's currently undergoing some challenges and reading the MSM coverage is maddening. It's the same lazy cliches written by some hack airlifted from New York City or San Francisco telling the country about how backwards the people here are without understanding that the politics here are a reaction to things happening elsewhere. When Gavin Newsom blocks state travel to Arizona as a reaction to certain policies they've adopted, that's good, but when people in areas that have seen a rise in homelessness and crime feel safer with guns, you need to educate (clap) yourself (clap).
I think it was Jonathan Haidt on Bari Weiss's podcast who made the point that when people can't have a discussion about complex controversies in public, that discussion is going to get pushed to the darkest corners and it's going to get ugly.
Kiwi Farms may be a shady corner for some, but it allows conversations that are not happening in the mainstream. Let's follow something, discuss it, sit with it, make a point, hear a counter-argument, get new information, sit with that for a bit, and evolve our ideas over time.
One news story that I absolutely credit Kiwi Farms for my understanding of was the Kyle Rittenhouse case. I was watching the live stream when that happened! You've never going to get live stream links and discussion from people on Facebook. Even admitting that you enjoy watching a literal dumpster fire is not something that "nice" people do. What I saw that night was a dumb kid in the middle of a full-throttle riot making some split-second decisions that saved his life. You can't say that in public lefty spheres because the media's coverage of it made it sound like he gunned down three peaceful black protesters in cold blood.
But apparently everyone commenting in that thread is a terrorist and I have been like the frog in the boiling water thinking that people were making good and reasonable points when really they're all Nazis and I have been ingesting Nazi propaganda. Crazy pills!
And don't get me started on the FBI being the arbiter of what the boundaries of the First Amendment should be. A lot of 2003 leftists would beat their 2022 selves into an insensate pulp over some of the rhetoric that has been spouted. (Am I committing stochastic terrorism by saying this?)
Hard agree. MSM is so bad on so many issues, it's lost (almost?) all credibility. But also, name an institution that doesn't lack credibility, right now. Ugh!!
I feel like I've kind of subconsciously learned the warning signs for when a MSM article might not be accurate. Anything involving hot button topics like race, gender, etc is gonna make me at least a little skeptical. Anything that reports something that fits *too perfect* with progressive politics is also gonna raise my ears a little, but the MSM articles that turn out to flat out wrong or have genuinely major problems are typically gonna revolve around identity politics. Not to say the rest of the reporting is great, but typical bad reporting just lacks context or is presented in a misleading way. The stuff that turns out to just be flat out wrong is almost always the hot button stuff with a strong race or other identity politics angle.
I do sometimes worry that by reading this Substack and listening to B&R I'll come to believe that Internet shit-shows really are a dominant aspect of the real world. Then I look around and breathe a sigh of relief.
Thanks again for the excellent reporting and another reminder why deleting Twitter was likely the healthiest thing I did in 2020.
> I am fuzzy on the technical specifics, but it’s harder to find reliable DDoS protection than it is to find a web host
This is probably something that you should have explained better in the pod. The reason that web hosting is so easy to find is that the laptop you used to write this blog post could be used as a web host: it's a really bad idea for the entire internet to be able to access your laptop, but there aren't any technical reasons why you can't do that. A web host is just a computer that can be accessed at a domain and serves a website: there is a Substack web host somewhere on the planet that is serving this website to you right now. It's just a computer running a program that allows it to send and receive information over the internet. Because this is such a simple thing to do that doesn't require special infrastructure outside of some network cables, a server, and power, a lot of companies offer hosting services.
A DDOS attack is attempt to spam a website with so much traffic that the web server hosting the website simply can't process all of the incoming requests and crashes. Cloudflare's services act as a 'bouncer' where when someone wants to visit 'kiwifarms.net' their request doesn't go straight to the server where Kiwifarms is hosted, but is instead sent to one of the many, many Datacenters at Cloudflare's disposal (this would mean literally thousands of servers). At this point, the 'bouncer' uses some fancy math to decide if some incoming traffic is just jsingal69 trying to keep tabs on one of this favourite lolcows or if is part of a coordinated attack a Keffals army member.
Building this kind of system to be able to prevent DDOS attacks without itself being taken down in a DDOS attack is incredibly expensive and requires expertise and resources that very few companies have.
Again, great work on this topic Jesse. The pods and this are all fantastic. I find these emails rather persuasive. Maybe I'm getting redpilled. Since leaving my "woke phase" I haven't used any social media platforms, unless one counts Substack or pseudonymous comments on a few individual old school blogs. What's becoming acceptable to say, or even think, is narrowing on a wide range of issues. It's easier for me now to have an open discussion with my intensely Catholic parents than with (all but the closest few of) my friends - nevermind the many acquaintances I know through them!
Good move on the social media, M. Nihilist. I was offline when it got popular, so was no problem giving up the little brush I had with it. I thank my lucky stars. Although, if I was pushed, I'd hafta classify Substack comments as a *kind-a* social media. High-level, but still...
But at least Substacks weren't *designed* to be addictive.
My age probably helped. I'm 40, so I didn't grow up online (my parents didn't get an internet connection till I was in college), never mind with social media.
I think I count as a normie? (Unless being a drunk and pothead are disqualifying?) I've never been an activist, save for participating in a few absurdly futile anti-Iraq War protests; and post-college, I didn't even vote regularly until 2012, after being on unemployment insurance for 7 months. (I figured the least I could do would be to vote in such a way that it's more likely than not that such programs continue.)
Thank You for reply. I'm 67. That means everything I say is drivel, by definition. We're both normies then. (Although I had-ta give up the alcohol and pot.) I was an old fart when I got involved heavily in the Net in early 2000s. But life intervened, and I'm just lately getting back into it.
My main gripe is that it takes time away from reading books. And I'm so uneducated I got a lotta catching up to do. TY again.
It appears that @keffals (Clara Sorrenti) has been involved in all manner of illegal/immoral activity. See "Kiwis vs. Predator" in Redux. Check the screenshots. It looks like @keffals boasts about engaging in illegal/immoral activity.
Thanks for this, I'm very glad someone finally provided some honest reporting on the episode. KF sounds like basically every internet forum before 2010 or so. That culture did have some big negatives but something important has also been lost.
"KF sounds like basically every internet forum before 2010 or so."
I was on a number of them. They were most definitely *not* like KF. I think there's truth to the idea that a site like KF is the only place *today* that you'll get actual interplay of ideas where people are willing to say what they really think because they know they are not going to get socially destroyed for it. But "back in the day" I was on several different sites (in some cases as a moderator) where there was robust, frequently heated political discussion because people from both sides, and yet there were no slurs, no doxing, and a hell of a lot less schadenfreude. I remember one of them where on fairly longtime valued member started to demand that we moderate the conservative views on the forum because they were "obviously in bad faith" and "just trying to troll." It hurt to lose someone whose ideas you'd come to respect, but we refused to moderate people based on their political views, even if we didn't necessarily share those views. *That* is what I miss. The fact that when we did that, there was no controversy, and everyone seemed to think that allowing discussion was better than censoring it. That was back in 2005 or so, and it was the first time I had a run-in with a liberal who was pro-censorship, who made an argument that some people shouldn't be allowed to speak.
Maybe I was just lucky. But I don't think KF represents what the old school forums did; while there were certainly many like it, there were many which had much of its good aspects without its bad aspects.
The places I was were typically relatively smaller forums (smaller by reddit standards) built into an existing web site -- for example, computer hardware reviews or some other specific interest group like games. The political stuff was all in the "off topic" areas of those forums, but those often got as much traffic as the on-topic areas. They were by no means perfect, but by comparison, they were ambrosia.
Thanks for this and the B&R coverage. I was casually familiar with Kiwi Farms, but hadn't heard of Keffals before this.
Your correspondent who talked about how broad the membership seemed to match my reading too. I assumed some people moved over when reddit shut down a lot of subs.
There were (are?) so many subsections on KF that you could read parts and be completely unaware of these apparently major blowups.
I thought of that old notion too. The moment it became necessary to have companies with the technical sophistication of Cloudflare to front web sites in order to stay running, the battle was lost.
It’s not a good story right now. There are too many insecurities at too many layers to really fix this, and too many bureaucrats in the once-competent technical authorities to sort it out. Like in the real world, no one can agree on anything at the Internet Standards level, so it’s left once again to giant companies to figure things out. It’s not working.
Stalking is interacting with another person repeatedly in a way that could cause a reasonable person to fear for the physical safety of him/herself or any other person. Making a Web page about a woman you're obsessed with is not illegal so long as all information you use was legally obtained (because of the First Amendment). The usual free speech absolutist take on this is, yes, this behavior is harmful, but criminalizing it is a bad idea because more authoritarian politicians (like, say, Trump or Putin) could use the same law to prosecute investigative journalists. The counter to this argument is that anti-stalking laws are based on a framework from the early 90s, before most people used the Internet. In any case, the world is probably a better place without Kiwi Farms, which might come back but will struggle to get the same amount of user activity.
The TLDR about Maoist Otherkin/Fictionkin is that most are probably neurodivergent and *might* be of interest to someone like a cultural studies ethnographer if they regularly make huge numbers of posts, like the top 5% of active users in post volume. I would be interested in reading about a revolutionary Maoist with Asperger's syndrome who identifies as Galadriel, but without doxing/slurs on the page.
Very interesting! I don't think of myself as overly credulous, but I didn't have any particular doubts when I read other KiwiFarms coverage. These are some great corrections, and I agree that they also make for a more interesting portrait. This sort of article is why I'm a paid subscriber.
As I've "said" before, I like everything You write. This one *well* worth the read and utterly *fascinating* to one who doesn't spend much time on the Net. (Except Substacks. *Too* much time there.)
If You're like most Substacks, the author never replies. No problemo. But I'm guessing the journalists who would actually do *any* research into *any* questions (other than You, M. Singal) is so vanishingly small, one could say ONE and not be far off. Am I wrong?
I know you probably want to wash your hands of this topic, but I would love some journalist to look into what's going on with Null/Joshua Moon being dropped and denied service by so many companies. (Google cut off his phone?? My understanding was a phone company couldn't do that even for suspected heroin dealers.)
I would've considered it bittersweet if KiwiFarms finally disappeared--it's only a forum after all--but companies' broad termination of contracts on the basis of rumors is concerning.
I've spent a lot of mental energy in the past few weeks angry at the MSM for their coverage of the controversy. I also feel like I've taken crazy pills hearing that a site I have frequented is full of actual, real life terrorists and somehow I just never noticed. Thank you, Jesse, for being willing to take a look at what the site is.
Maybe I'm just old and tired but I remember when the internet was the wild west. Kiwis still has that atmosphere. Take a wrong turn down a dark alley and you're reading about "smashed and slammed" pit bulls or seeing graphic botched SRS photos.
I don't think you can talk about it without talking about what the rest of the internet has become.
Facebook not only censors what you can say, but if you mention something like Covid, it will put a helpful link at the bottom of your post so you can go educate (clap) yourself (clap) about how getting your toddler vaccinated against a disease that literally one toddler in the US has died from is right and good. I feel the need to state here that I am by no means a coof foil-hatter and I am triple vaxxed, but the last two jabs kicked my ass and pretending that getting a jab is a totally harmless thing to do is laughable.
Discussion sites that used to support lively debates are now just a bunch of people agreeing with each other. Look at the discussion on Democratic Underground about the Supreme Court and Yeshiva. Obviously any person who claims that sodomy is against their religion is just being homophobic for no reason so you need to educate (clap) yourself (clap). Again, I am a friend of the gays, but pretending that there is no conflict between religious belief and modern views about sexuality is deluded.
As a third example, very few papers support comments sections where people can discuss what the article says. I understand that these comments sections were often a peanut gallery of heckling and slapfights, but reading other people's views on the topic de jour often sharpened my thinking about something. I live in an area that's currently undergoing some challenges and reading the MSM coverage is maddening. It's the same lazy cliches written by some hack airlifted from New York City or San Francisco telling the country about how backwards the people here are without understanding that the politics here are a reaction to things happening elsewhere. When Gavin Newsom blocks state travel to Arizona as a reaction to certain policies they've adopted, that's good, but when people in areas that have seen a rise in homelessness and crime feel safer with guns, you need to educate (clap) yourself (clap).
I think it was Jonathan Haidt on Bari Weiss's podcast who made the point that when people can't have a discussion about complex controversies in public, that discussion is going to get pushed to the darkest corners and it's going to get ugly.
Kiwi Farms may be a shady corner for some, but it allows conversations that are not happening in the mainstream. Let's follow something, discuss it, sit with it, make a point, hear a counter-argument, get new information, sit with that for a bit, and evolve our ideas over time.
One news story that I absolutely credit Kiwi Farms for my understanding of was the Kyle Rittenhouse case. I was watching the live stream when that happened! You've never going to get live stream links and discussion from people on Facebook. Even admitting that you enjoy watching a literal dumpster fire is not something that "nice" people do. What I saw that night was a dumb kid in the middle of a full-throttle riot making some split-second decisions that saved his life. You can't say that in public lefty spheres because the media's coverage of it made it sound like he gunned down three peaceful black protesters in cold blood.
But apparently everyone commenting in that thread is a terrorist and I have been like the frog in the boiling water thinking that people were making good and reasonable points when really they're all Nazis and I have been ingesting Nazi propaganda. Crazy pills!
And don't get me started on the FBI being the arbiter of what the boundaries of the First Amendment should be. A lot of 2003 leftists would beat their 2022 selves into an insensate pulp over some of the rhetoric that has been spouted. (Am I committing stochastic terrorism by saying this?)
Anyway, thanks again for the good journalism.
Hard agree. MSM is so bad on so many issues, it's lost (almost?) all credibility. But also, name an institution that doesn't lack credibility, right now. Ugh!!
I feel like I've kind of subconsciously learned the warning signs for when a MSM article might not be accurate. Anything involving hot button topics like race, gender, etc is gonna make me at least a little skeptical. Anything that reports something that fits *too perfect* with progressive politics is also gonna raise my ears a little, but the MSM articles that turn out to flat out wrong or have genuinely major problems are typically gonna revolve around identity politics. Not to say the rest of the reporting is great, but typical bad reporting just lacks context or is presented in a misleading way. The stuff that turns out to just be flat out wrong is almost always the hot button stuff with a strong race or other identity politics angle.
I do sometimes worry that by reading this Substack and listening to B&R I'll come to believe that Internet shit-shows really are a dominant aspect of the real world. Then I look around and breathe a sigh of relief.
Thanks again for the excellent reporting and another reminder why deleting Twitter was likely the healthiest thing I did in 2020.
Yup agree with M. Adrian, as I commented elsewhere.
> I am fuzzy on the technical specifics, but it’s harder to find reliable DDoS protection than it is to find a web host
This is probably something that you should have explained better in the pod. The reason that web hosting is so easy to find is that the laptop you used to write this blog post could be used as a web host: it's a really bad idea for the entire internet to be able to access your laptop, but there aren't any technical reasons why you can't do that. A web host is just a computer that can be accessed at a domain and serves a website: there is a Substack web host somewhere on the planet that is serving this website to you right now. It's just a computer running a program that allows it to send and receive information over the internet. Because this is such a simple thing to do that doesn't require special infrastructure outside of some network cables, a server, and power, a lot of companies offer hosting services.
A DDOS attack is attempt to spam a website with so much traffic that the web server hosting the website simply can't process all of the incoming requests and crashes. Cloudflare's services act as a 'bouncer' where when someone wants to visit 'kiwifarms.net' their request doesn't go straight to the server where Kiwifarms is hosted, but is instead sent to one of the many, many Datacenters at Cloudflare's disposal (this would mean literally thousands of servers). At this point, the 'bouncer' uses some fancy math to decide if some incoming traffic is just jsingal69 trying to keep tabs on one of this favourite lolcows or if is part of a coordinated attack a Keffals army member.
Building this kind of system to be able to prevent DDOS attacks without itself being taken down in a DDOS attack is incredibly expensive and requires expertise and resources that very few companies have.
This is a quick video from Cloudflare explaining their DDOS protection at a high level: https://youtu.be/xdd505iOmDg?t=78
Again, great work on this topic Jesse. The pods and this are all fantastic. I find these emails rather persuasive. Maybe I'm getting redpilled. Since leaving my "woke phase" I haven't used any social media platforms, unless one counts Substack or pseudonymous comments on a few individual old school blogs. What's becoming acceptable to say, or even think, is narrowing on a wide range of issues. It's easier for me now to have an open discussion with my intensely Catholic parents than with (all but the closest few of) my friends - nevermind the many acquaintances I know through them!
Good move on the social media, M. Nihilist. I was offline when it got popular, so was no problem giving up the little brush I had with it. I thank my lucky stars. Although, if I was pushed, I'd hafta classify Substack comments as a *kind-a* social media. High-level, but still...
But at least Substacks weren't *designed* to be addictive.
My age probably helped. I'm 40, so I didn't grow up online (my parents didn't get an internet connection till I was in college), never mind with social media.
I think I count as a normie? (Unless being a drunk and pothead are disqualifying?) I've never been an activist, save for participating in a few absurdly futile anti-Iraq War protests; and post-college, I didn't even vote regularly until 2012, after being on unemployment insurance for 7 months. (I figured the least I could do would be to vote in such a way that it's more likely than not that such programs continue.)
Thank You for reply. I'm 67. That means everything I say is drivel, by definition. We're both normies then. (Although I had-ta give up the alcohol and pot.) I was an old fart when I got involved heavily in the Net in early 2000s. But life intervened, and I'm just lately getting back into it.
My main gripe is that it takes time away from reading books. And I'm so uneducated I got a lotta catching up to do. TY again.
I read @ACABMarxPaw and assumed it stood for Assigned Cow At Birth and not All Cops Are Bastards. I guess both parse. Amazing work as always.
It appears that @keffals (Clara Sorrenti) has been involved in all manner of illegal/immoral activity. See "Kiwis vs. Predator" in Redux. Check the screenshots. It looks like @keffals boasts about engaging in illegal/immoral activity.
Thanks for this, I'm very glad someone finally provided some honest reporting on the episode. KF sounds like basically every internet forum before 2010 or so. That culture did have some big negatives but something important has also been lost.
"KF sounds like basically every internet forum before 2010 or so."
I was on a number of them. They were most definitely *not* like KF. I think there's truth to the idea that a site like KF is the only place *today* that you'll get actual interplay of ideas where people are willing to say what they really think because they know they are not going to get socially destroyed for it. But "back in the day" I was on several different sites (in some cases as a moderator) where there was robust, frequently heated political discussion because people from both sides, and yet there were no slurs, no doxing, and a hell of a lot less schadenfreude. I remember one of them where on fairly longtime valued member started to demand that we moderate the conservative views on the forum because they were "obviously in bad faith" and "just trying to troll." It hurt to lose someone whose ideas you'd come to respect, but we refused to moderate people based on their political views, even if we didn't necessarily share those views. *That* is what I miss. The fact that when we did that, there was no controversy, and everyone seemed to think that allowing discussion was better than censoring it. That was back in 2005 or so, and it was the first time I had a run-in with a liberal who was pro-censorship, who made an argument that some people shouldn't be allowed to speak.
Maybe I was just lucky. But I don't think KF represents what the old school forums did; while there were certainly many like it, there were many which had much of its good aspects without its bad aspects.
Fair enough, I suppose I was thinking of reddit and similar sites primarily - not sure what you have in mind.
The places I was were typically relatively smaller forums (smaller by reddit standards) built into an existing web site -- for example, computer hardware reviews or some other specific interest group like games. The political stuff was all in the "off topic" areas of those forums, but those often got as much traffic as the on-topic areas. They were by no means perfect, but by comparison, they were ambrosia.
Thanks for this and the B&R coverage. I was casually familiar with Kiwi Farms, but hadn't heard of Keffals before this.
Your correspondent who talked about how broad the membership seemed to match my reading too. I assumed some people moved over when reddit shut down a lot of subs.
There were (are?) so many subsections on KF that you could read parts and be completely unaware of these apparently major blowups.
The "internet routes around censorship" people were a bit wrong weren't they?
I thought of that old notion too. The moment it became necessary to have companies with the technical sophistication of Cloudflare to front web sites in order to stay running, the battle was lost.
It’s not a good story right now. There are too many insecurities at too many layers to really fix this, and too many bureaucrats in the once-competent technical authorities to sort it out. Like in the real world, no one can agree on anything at the Internet Standards level, so it’s left once again to giant companies to figure things out. It’s not working.
Stalking is interacting with another person repeatedly in a way that could cause a reasonable person to fear for the physical safety of him/herself or any other person. Making a Web page about a woman you're obsessed with is not illegal so long as all information you use was legally obtained (because of the First Amendment). The usual free speech absolutist take on this is, yes, this behavior is harmful, but criminalizing it is a bad idea because more authoritarian politicians (like, say, Trump or Putin) could use the same law to prosecute investigative journalists. The counter to this argument is that anti-stalking laws are based on a framework from the early 90s, before most people used the Internet. In any case, the world is probably a better place without Kiwi Farms, which might come back but will struggle to get the same amount of user activity.
The TLDR about Maoist Otherkin/Fictionkin is that most are probably neurodivergent and *might* be of interest to someone like a cultural studies ethnographer if they regularly make huge numbers of posts, like the top 5% of active users in post volume. I would be interested in reading about a revolutionary Maoist with Asperger's syndrome who identifies as Galadriel, but without doxing/slurs on the page.
Very interesting! I don't think of myself as overly credulous, but I didn't have any particular doubts when I read other KiwiFarms coverage. These are some great corrections, and I agree that they also make for a more interesting portrait. This sort of article is why I'm a paid subscriber.
Related post: https://reduxx.info/kiwis-vs-predator/
(Pretty good, IMO.)
"[Have] First Amendment protection, with the exception of illegally acquired information."
This needs a fact check.
Thanks for the deep dive on this subject. You won't get this in the MSM.
The internet is a weird place.
As I've "said" before, I like everything You write. This one *well* worth the read and utterly *fascinating* to one who doesn't spend much time on the Net. (Except Substacks. *Too* much time there.)
If You're like most Substacks, the author never replies. No problemo. But I'm guessing the journalists who would actually do *any* research into *any* questions (other than You, M. Singal) is so vanishingly small, one could say ONE and not be far off. Am I wrong?
TY again for Your work, Sir.
I know you probably want to wash your hands of this topic, but I would love some journalist to look into what's going on with Null/Joshua Moon being dropped and denied service by so many companies. (Google cut off his phone?? My understanding was a phone company couldn't do that even for suspected heroin dealers.)
I would've considered it bittersweet if KiwiFarms finally disappeared--it's only a forum after all--but companies' broad termination of contracts on the basis of rumors is concerning.