
Kiwi Farms is currently under DDoS - quazar
https://kiwifarms.net/
======
wyldfire
Unless we can link to a status page or other discussion of Kiwi Farms, linking
to them here seems to only make things worse.

I'd never heard of it so here goes (from [1]):

> Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is an American Internet forum
> dedicated to the ongoing harassment and stalking of online figures and
> communities it deems "lolcows": the eccentric, artistic, or mentally ill.

It's likely a target of DDoS related to the mass shootings here in the US this
past weekend. Is there a specific role they played in these specific events or
is it just retribution for their rejection of norms?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms)

~~~
api
So this is yet another anime / comics / gaming fan-site that's transformed
into a hotbed of misogyny, fascism, and borderline terrorism advocacy?

The link between geek culture and the latter things is something I am still
trying to wrap my head around. I don't get the connection at all. If you'd
told me that anime fan-sites would become important recruitment grounds for
terrorism ten years ago I would have laughed at you, yet here we are.

Can someone explain this?

~~~
JulianMorrison
Roughly, geek culture has always been toxic masculinity by the back door.

You can get perhaps the clearest insight into this by looking at geeky films
from the 80s before they started to bury the unpalatable stuff. "The girl" is
the reward. The geeky hero (a boy/teen/manboy) gets to win by virtue of geeky
skills. Often, humiliating one dimensional "jock" bullies through gained
abilities is a payoff too (cf: the Neverending Story, scaring the bullies into
a dumpster with a dragon).

Geek culture more broadly, including the adult programmer-gamer culture, has
long believed of itself "we see ability, not appearance" but (1) this has
always been untrue in reality, it was racist and sexist and still is, and (2)
the things the culture has valued as "winning" have never been different in
fundamentals from the mainstream of toxic masculinity - money, women,
possessions and power all seen as more or less fungible commodities.

What you're seeing now is the reaction of angry white men who are profoundly
frustrated at receiving "less than their due". They blame women, they blame
minorities, because they _should_ be winning - are they not the very pattern
of a hero, a young white man with geeky interests? And yet inexplicably they
are not. (It's very explicable, geeky skills _aren 't special_.)

Anger turns to attempts to put things "right" with terroristic murder.

~~~
api
> You can get perhaps the clearest insight into this by looking at geeky films
> from the 80s before they started to bury the unpalatable stuff. "The girl"
> is the reward. The geeky hero (a boy/teen/manboy) gets to win by virtue of
> geeky skills. Often, humiliating one dimensional "jock" bullies through
> gained abilities is a payoff too (cf: the Neverending Story, scaring the
> bullies into a dumpster with a dragon).

Isn't this more or less the standard issue "hero's journey" plot template?

~~~
JulianMorrison
The hero's journey is broad brush enough that what counts as heroic behaviour,
what counts as growth in the face of adversity, what counts as victory, and
what counts as a reward are entirely up for grabs. So it's THJ with a crude
form of masculine power fantasy woven through it. Importantly, it's very
similar in all but superficial form to the "jock" power fantasy that it is by
subcultural convention held up against. Geek culture has been this since the
beginning.

~~~
CompanionCuuube
And your definition of "masculine power fantasy" is so broad enough that you
could paint Aliens or The Empire Strikes Back with them.

------
CJefferson
For those who don't know: Kiwi farms is a forum dedicated to being mean to
people, particularly women who have an Internet presense, in weirdly obsessive
threads that go for thousands of posts.

~~~
noaccount2020
It's a gossip site dedicated to ppl who made THEMSELVES internet celebrities.
And outside of munchy-moms very few women breach the LOLcow barrier. Unless
you really mean transwomen, and even then the barrier is high, like Jessica
Yaniv who sued women for not waxing its balls, for sexting 12-yos for a
decade, who finally got uncovered b/c KF was keeping receipts.

------
asstonbuttford
Kiwifarms, as someone else pointed out, is primarily a gossip site that also
_really_ enjoys doxxing pedophiles and zoosadists. It has roots in trolling,
but these days it actively discourages harassing subjects on the grounds that
these people don't need to be prodded to be entertaining, they do that
themselves via their own terrible behavior.

It tends to lean right as a general rule, but the members are all over the
place politically and ideologically, and where they congregate differs hugely
depending on which thread you're in.

In short, it's a site full of shitty people sitting around laughing at even
worse people.

------
buildzr
I wonder if we'll see a big move of such sites to ZeroNet or similar, it's
fast and supports distributed databases, there's already a few imageboards on
there looking to replace 8chan - 08chan and millchan. I'm sure it's hard for
them to get users existing exclusively there, but adding clearnet portals to
such services might do the job.

------
pkilgore
Wikipedia:

> Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is an American Internet forum
> dedicated to the ongoing harassment and stalking of online figures and
> communities it deems "lolcows": the eccentric, artistic, or mentally ill.

I, uhh, what?

------
mijoharas
Obviously a Ddos is of some interest to the HN community, but is this story of
interest to people? Seems like a site dedicated to harassment is under attack.
Is anything interesting about this?

~~~
phoe-krk
It is highly contextual to the recent stories that have made it to HN
frontpages: 8chan getting banned by Cloudflare[1], and subsequently, by its
hosting provider[2].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20616055)

------
lawlessone
Good

