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Just a primer for those not in the know (since the primary source for these is, well, down right now):
Chloe Sagal self-immolated as an act of protest against the sorry state of mental healthcare. She repeatedly tried to go to other people in the LGBT community for help and housing, but for various reasons (it's a long story), they did not provide it to her. She was holding a manifesto but it flew away when she set herself on fire. Many people blame her death on the Farms despite there being no evidence for this (besides her having a thread), and doing this cheapens her death while letting systemic societal issues go by without scrutiny.
Julie Terryberry was abused for years by her significant other. Notably, Julie was not trans, and anyone reporting her as trans is spreading misinformation and should not be trusted. As a result of the abuse, when her S.O. left her, she killed herself. This is tragic, but pinning her death on a website (just for having a thread) is a disgrace to those who are in abusive relationships and does nothing to combat the true cause of her death.
Byuu/Near emailed Null and threatened to commit suicide if his 13-page thread that had been dead for months wasn't taken down. He did not take it down (and anyone doing the tiniest of game theory should know that if he did, it would have set a precedent incentivizing more people to threaten suicide to take threads down). Shortly thereafter, he posted a suicide note, and then his death was "confirmed" by a claimed friend of his (who no one knew was his friend) who claimed to have direct contact with the Japanese police, despite Japan having strict privacy laws and that no police department in the developed world would ever willingly give out information to people who are not close family members of the deceased. There remains no proof of his death except for a statement by another third-party claiming to be his employer. And yet despite the outrage there hasn't been much evidence of him ever being harassed by the site (no, criticizing him on your own forum is not harassment). Every time people claim this, they speak in general terms and vague vibes, but never give any specific details as to what happened, and certainly don't provide enough substance to link the Farms to it.
The most infuriating part of all this is that it is trivial to point to actual instances of the site acting against the subjects of its threads, or in their terms, "poo-touching". All one needs to do is point to any of the many zoosadist threads on the site (zoosadist meaning a zoophile who has abused animals) who have ended up in jail. But that would paint the site in a good light, and they don't want to do that.
Null has taken down threads. The number one reason he does not is that the users will immediately notice and just put the information back up, and while he could of course ban the users for doing that, it just paints a big Streisand-mansion-sized target on it, completely backfiring any attempt to remove it.
Quietly delisting and then deleting a thread that has been dead for a while was likely to work and Null might have done it, especially because Near was offering a big pile of cash. But in the middle of talking Near said "fuck it I am killing myself" and then ghosted the world.
Agreed. One of the things that kind of baffles me about the incident was how Near negotiated with Null, or rather, didn't.
If I was him, I wouldn't have opened with a gambit like "take my $120,000 and delete the thread or I kill myself". That shows your cards too early, that makes it sound like you preplanned this and are hoping to be able to strong-arm him into doing it, and it provides a game-theoretic reason for him to say no (because you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists and you shouldn't negotiate with extreme demands like that).
Secondly, as Null would say on his podcast later, he kind of didn't get why a dead 13-page thread was so harmful to him. One of the things Near said was that a friend of ten years left him, and Null was like "so instead of being mad at them, you come to me for it?" Honestly, I'm still not sure why that thread was so bad to him even if he was actually dead. Other threads on the site allege that people have molested children, abused animals, done all sorts of horrible things (and none of them have attempted or faked suicide) and yet the worst that could be said in Near's thread was that he defended Christopher Handley (a man convicted of possession of drawn child pornography) 12 years ago before he recanted it and said it was a stupid thing of him to have done. There's various conspiracy theories that speculate he faked his death to avoid potential legal action from Nintendo for his emulator development or something, but there's really no evidence for them either and it would still be baffling for him to have done this.
And thirdly, he waited 12 hours after Null's last reply before citing some unknown time limit(?) and deciding to follow through with his plan while Null had (assumedly) gone to bed. To this day I still have no idea what that was about. He didn't even use the time limit as a negotiation chip because he never told him about it.
All of this is to say that if I was in this situation, I probably would have done my homework and figured out the best way to persuade him, and only offer money if things seemed to be going south. But not $120,000 all at once; I'd start with $5,000 at the most. And I wouldn't threaten suicide or institute an arbitrary time limit or anything. If the thread couldn't get taken down then, well, my BATNA is to just get off the internet (or at least social media) at that point.
Suicidal people tend to not be making good decisions. [citation needed] And that awful people don't kill themselves doesn't actually change how decent people consider the same allegations beyond the pale, or a very serious matter.
More broadly, there's still remaining archives of parts the byuu/near thread, and there's random allegations of shota stuff before you hit double digits. You or I may not particularly care about "Joe Biden's Left Testicle" making unfounded allegations, but combined with (alleged!) calls to friends and family, would not be the best way to work with someone that the posters already thought was crazy and hysterical.
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I think Near was hoping for a narrative of "I even offered 100K and they still said it was not enough." When Josh started negotiating in earnest, Near panicked.
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Oh wow, the fact that Byuu/Near might actually just have committed "virtual" suicide of his handle makes me quite happy. That seemed like a really unnecessary, sad and weird way to die for someone who is so obviously talented and driven.
But it also shows to me how easy it is to get fooled by these kind of "internet truths" where nobody checks anything and everything is proven by citations of secondary sources of flimsy evidence. It's definitely something I should be a bit more wary about in the future.
Regarding KiwiFarms: I don't think I have any love for the site and even less for its users. The site and its users might sometimes do marginally positive things by accident, but on average they seem unnecessarily cruel and antagonistic towards ... mostly random autistic internet strangers.
So if the site dies, I will not shed a tear.
But of course, it's always the jerk who had it coming (other example is the daily stormer) who gets censored first. We have come a far way from the old internet where "censorship is not the answer" (this was a left-coded position not too long ago). However, the fact that you can't have a mildly hated site on the internet anymore without being at least tolerated by one big tech company is certainly discomforting.
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