[cluedos]

I feel sorry for Cloudflare's management team in having to deal with all this nonsense.

What they really want to focus on is growing their business, developing new cloud-scale technologies, and serving their customers the best they can.

Instead they've ended up stuck in this ridiculous online spat between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals.

If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.

[malepoon]

> between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals

This is a bit too much "both sides are bad" for me. Fact is that Kiwi Farms is a horrible website where people harass others, share information about them, and drive them to suicide. That's pretty bad on its own.

[cluedos]

Look at it from Cloudflare employees' point of view though. Do they really want to spend their time getting drawn in to any more of this trivial online drama? No, of course not. Pulling the plug is the sensible business decision.

[UncleMeat]

This is definitely online drama, but I'm not sure I'd call it "trivial." This isn't people arguing about how many days are in a week.

[cluedos]

It's trivial in the same way that celebrity gossip is trivial.

[UncleMeat]

Whether foo and bar will get married is, in my opinion, considerably different from organizations that collect and magnify hatred against members of various disempowered groups.

[cluedos]

Out of these two antagonistic online mobs, which is the disempowered one?

[honkdaddy]

Are transwomen creators really disempowered online these days? The internet's a very different place from how it was in 2007.

Contrapoints, Gigi, Maya Henry were the first three that came to mind and from what I've seen all have wildly successful online followings, and a literal army of Twitter and Discord users to come to their defense. KF is the only site I'm aware of that bullies trans people, but I can think of loads of popular accounts and forums that happily go after Republicans, depressed single men, Christians, and any other group which the online majority has decided is deserving of abuse. I think the take "trans people have a hard time being accepted online" is pretty outdated now.

[salawat]

Care to list the disempowered groups?

[tomjen3]

The problem is that if you give in once, or are perceived to give in, then not only will both sides hate you for it, but you will be under even more pressure to give in next time.

To run something like Cloudflare you probably have to have the rule that you will not block services for anyone under any circumstances unless ordered to by a court, or they advocate for a blocking campaign against you, or host content that does. In this case they would have let kf of, but block Twitter.

[2Gkashmiri]

I don't get it. Do trans people and women and all the alleged victims "are a part of that community" that they endured years of torture and talking down leading to suicide as is being alleged or do these KF people do doxing on sorts on other sites and use KF as a central place to coordinate attacks?

I am not on 8chan. I can never be harassed by anyone in /b/ or whatever the bad that forums are.

If I am aan active part of a community, I should not claim peer pressure and influence or should I not?

[malepoon]

> or do these KF people do doxing on sorts on other sites and use KF as a central place to coordinate attacks?

Yep. KF is their harassment HQ where they share information about individuals they don't approve of. It's creepy.

[salawat]

...That's always going to exist. It's gone by different names. It's why you aren't supposed to share personal info on the Web, btw, because anyone can get to it, now without even leaving the comfort of home.

The bus has sailed on that one though.

[2Gkashmiri]

you know when the whole foursquare started gamification of locations, i did go into it pretty early on but some "time" later i was like "why am i doing this? for achievements?"

same for the whole gamification of your facebook profile which nudges you to give more and more info about yourself... the "connect your accounts" is terrible way of keeping watertight identities.

look. do you remember when "chatroom etiquette" meant not correctly answering a/s/l? because that would be creepy if the stranger found out and nasty things could happen?

i mean its easy to "connect" and tie everything to one identity but then that same identity means you cannot hide. its a tradeoff and one i personally am willing to give.

[eternalban]

> If I was CEO of Cloudflare, and I and my employees were being harassed, doxxed, threatened by an online mob, I'd have done the same. Never mind taking a principled stand, it's not worth being involved in the first place.

Fair enough. But this CEO was blowing clouds in our face that they took this action because our legal system is not up to the task!

It's so sad that Mr. Prince apparently can't afford having a competent legal team to explain to him the concepts of "Rule of Law", "Due Process", "Courts", "Judges", "Juries", "Evidence", and all that other [quaint!] aspects of our (broken!) "traditional legal system".

[Karellen]

If you are walking down the street, and see one person kicking the shit out of another, dial 911 to report it, and are told that the police will be there in 5 minutes, is it vigilantism to step in and break the fight up, or try to physically restrain the attacker? Given that the victim might sustain a severe or life-threatening injury in that 5 minutes?

Would stepping in be an indictment of "rule of law", "due process", "courts", "judges", "juries", "evidence", and support a claim that our traditional legal system is "broken"?

If you perceive an imminent threat to a third party, and have reason to believe that it might take the police too long to respond (simply because they can't be everywhere, all at once, and if they turn up ASAP guns blazing then that's how you get SWATting), do you think a good citizen should just look on and conclude that said third party is just having the worst day today, and it's a shame nobody could have prevented it?

[salawat]

Was that person getting physically kicked the shit out of?

I see exchanges of meta-information, recognized by courts of law to be public, and hear nothing of actual physical violence.

You do not, however go, and put someone in a sleeper hold, or call a construction company to come pull out the chunk of sidewalk a fight is occurring on. Also, if you have someone going and publically antagonizing another group, the general approach is inform LE, and caution the one on the receiving end to keep their head down.

If all they do is make themself more of a target, no amount of legal system or police force will protect them. If they scale their being a target beyond their capability to defend themselves from those that would target them, well... Society tends to self-correct through violence, in case you hadn't noticed. Learning "where thine chicanery will not be tolerated" is kinda part of the whole surviving in civilization shtick.

Mind, I've been on the recieving end of that Good Samaritanism. I pay it forward every chance I get. If you think I didn't learn to take care of myself better though, you're barking up the wrong tree.

[timmytokyo]

I don't get it. Why does Prince require a legal team to explain to him the rule of law? Everything he has done in this matter has been within the letter of the law.

[eternalban]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32707821

"A little bit geek, wonk, and nerd. Repeat entrepreneur, recovering lawyer and former ski instructor. CEO & co-founder of CloudFlare."

And oh my God. He is "recovering lawyer".

This is what he concluded with:

"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than free speech, in order to have a more robust conversation with frameworks that have an appeal and applicability across nearly every nation and government."

So this exactly the reasoning of those (bad? good?) cops that beat suspects in alley, or conduct search on private property without a warrant.

And this cop then turns around and says:

"Encourage you when these issues arise to think of them in the rule of law context, rather than your civil rights"

The term for this type of action is Extrajudicial -- possibly our recovering lawyer remembers that from law school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_punishment

To repeat, Cloudflare has every right (afaik) to just say "bad client, we don't want you". This CEO however chose to frame this as some sort of civic virtuous action necessitated by alleged failings of our "traditional legal systems".

[edit]

[cluedos]

The statements made by any company representative responding to PR crisis shouldn't be taken as the unvarnished truth. The purpose is reputation management, dampening negative publicity before it overwhelms, while hopefully minimising long-term reputational damage.