- Tolkien minority
- Feb 14, 2012
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Hello Something Awful. First of all, I would just like to specify that this is not my account, this was loaned to me to make this post. I understand that account sharing is against the rules, but hopefully, considering the circumstances, an exception will be made. I will not be using this account for long. Lowtax is going to be giving me my own account tomorrow. He has not read this post yet, but I do have his permission to post it.
I am Kiwi Farms user 'OwO What's This?' you might have recognized my avatar from this funny YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APrBdP0bBJM
I imagine a lot of you have very strong feelings about Kiwi Farms, and that's fine. I'm going to lift the veil as to the motives of a lot of our activities, and as to why the site is gone now. I feel like I should do the former first.
First of all, something to understand: There was never a real war with Something Awful, at least not from our perspective. Doxxing in our community served several purposes, but believe it or not, none of them was harassment. With respect to your community, it was a tactic used to pop social bubbles, damage safe spaces, and lift a mirror up to your community. In that respect, it worked wonders, despite loving up hilariously a couple times - like when a 'double agent' informant got us to dox the Goatse guy. Let me tell you, I found it HILARIOUS, but there were those behind the scenes that were quite bitter about the trick. Whichever goon got us with that deserves a medal.
But let's be real: You wouldn't have been a fun target if your community was doing well. It's not. There were many of those within our community who not only felt like you would be a fun target, but felt a sense of injustice that a site that used to be so legendary, a site they were a part of, was dramatically changing into one that prioritized people's feelings over comedy. There is an extremely vocal minority on your website trying to play morality police and shut down conversation.
The decision to start this mock war with your website happened when your Shmorky thread was successfully shut down by the combined efforts of a mutinous administration and their defence of a user spamming up the thread for many pages to make it unreadable. But before poo poo got dirty, the site's owner, Null, tried his hardest to reach out to Lowtax and LadyAmbien to try to help while holding back the wolves best he could. When that proved fruitless, he stopped standing in the way.
A lot of laughs were had, and the only regret shared was a lot of it came at Lowtax's expense. The grand irony of ironies is that if you had listened to Lowtax in the first place none of this would have even happened - and he's the one taking the most heat. Which is not to say Lowtax is completely blameless... he really should've stood his ground on a lot of issues. Moderators were walking all over him in public. Almost any other community, your rear end would've been handed to you for pulling something like that. My guess is a lot of people felt 'immune' due to how close-knit the moderation team is. The massive solidarity walk-out recently is evidence of this. In fact, one of your moderators was so angry that despite hating Kiwi Farms, they were going to let us into the mod forum and archive everything simply out of spite. And we weren't going to say no.
And speaking of turncoats, for all the allegations of transphobia placed on Kiwi Farms, there's something you should know - almost 100% of the information regarding transgender members of your community came from transgender people in your community - people who felt like they were shut down for wrongthink by both their peers and the backing of the administration. Of all the admin panels bans (bans that don't show up in the Leper's Colony or on people's avatars) doled out after the grand doxxing, you only managed to hit one of our informants. Literally everyone else was innocent, and I'm not making that up to help anyone.
To prove it, I would like to let you all in on another ruse - Jenner is not a troll account. She is real. Because she was trying SO HARD to get targeted by us so she could become some sort of martyr, we came up with the narrative that we discovered she was playing all of you as some sort of master class long term troll. It was wonderful to see the bait taken by so many goons pretending not to have been reading the thread. But make no mistake - so many people bought it for good reason. When you looked at her behavior, you wanted her to be fake. That's what made the lie so appealing. It is a secret we would've kept and giggled to ourselves forever had Kiwi Farms not been shut down.
Which... brings me to that unfortunate story. Null is a huge believer in free speech, and would allow just about anything to be said on his website so long as it was legal. And whether or not you agreed or disagreed with our methods, it was legal. He sees the world as becoming too big and complicated for any major public figure to face any sort of scrutiny for their actions unless it came at the sacrifice of privacy. In other words, with the incomprehensible amount of people involved in influencing the world around us and the field of journalism becoming an entertainment industry, Kiwi Farms was viewed as the lesser of two evils. If it meant to have the dick pics of EVERYONE to get to the bottom of who is accountable for what, so be it. It is so easy in this day and age to sweep things under the rug, and if Kiwi Farms hadn't existed when it did, Shmorky wouldn't have been exposed as a pedophile.
And whether or not you agree with that principle, it was a principle Null strongly believed in. He sacrificed everything for his website up until the bitter end. Kiwi Farms made an enemy, one hell of an enemy. No, not Derek Smart. This was a man with no ethics or morals, who went to any end necessary to achieve his goals. He is a man so dangerous, that even saying his name on your website puts you at risk. Now doesn't that sound silly? I imagine some of you are chuckling at the idea. But it is true. He is a man that fancies himself a literal terrorist. And for the sake of irony, I'll refer to him as Voldemort.
Without the benefit of the KF resources in front of me, it is hard to delve into specifics. Voldemort completely ruined Null's life from top to bottom, but Null wouldn't quit. Even with himself becoming unhireable due to the harassment he faced, he stuck to his principles. He wasn't going to let someone else tell him what to do. That's when Voldemort started going after Null's family. But so principled was Null that for the longest time, even as his family was harassed, he still said no. It put him at an awful strain with every relative he had.
But finally, a line was crossed. Voldemort's harassment of his mother finally became too much for him to bear. His campaign involved sending childing pornography to everyone involved in her real estate career under an endless supply of pseudonyms. Her real estate license was revoked. And something else happened very recently that he has not gotten into, not even with me, that finally convinced him to pull the plug on the entire website.
Terrorism won.
As a final plea, I want you to consider some of the values Null shared, as distasteful as you might find them. Look at the world around you and compare it to the world of years past. In many ways, it has gotten better, but I have never seen censorship like this before. Mob rule is becoming the norm, wherein we're not controlled by the majority anymore, but an extremely vocal minority whose endless patience for harassment triumphs over people who just want to live their lives.
Don't let Something Awful become like that, I beg of you.
Thank you for your time.
heck, same
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Jan 21, 2017 07:38
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