Kiwifarms is a forum for harassing people. Famously Near (the developer behind BSNES/Higan emulator) committed suicide in part due to the abuse he received from that forum. And people on kiwifarms celebrated his death.

Only reason I know of it is from the thread at the time on HN.

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Melonai 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's also important to note that Near identified as non-binary. This isn't just a "respect their pronouns!" type of thing, but an important aspect of the KiwiFarms propensity to target trans and queer people.

Notably this also isn't the only suicide attributed to the forum, another trans woman by the name of Chloe Sagal also was harassed by them into suicide in 2018, alongside a Canadian woman named Julie Terryberry in 2016.

The forum takes credit for this (though of course, not officially by the admins), with it being basically an explicit goal. I believe they also had a "kill counter" in a thread to count the people they brought to kill themselves. And the fact that they love targeting trans people, autistic people, and basically everyone who's different is a big part of the whole culture they've build.

Note that I prefer to not expose myself to that, so I invite other people to add info or refute something I said.

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busterarm 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Near admitted to being severely depressed and disillusioned about life years before the KF thread and harassment started. Near was also involved in several internet dramas long before the KF thread. It didn't help that they participated in these threads and admitted to things like self-gratification to shotacon content, etc.

KF is a horrible place, but saying that they bullied this person into suicide is an easy scapegoat and a long stretch. Near/Byuu did a lot, deliberately, to bring negative attention to themselves over the years. For someone deeply involved in the emulation scene, they certainly committed lots of the scene's cardinal sins -- dump hoarding and gloating about it in particular.

They also license trolled commercial users of competing emulators as a source of income... Threw temper tantrums about the existence of FPGA-based emulation because it wouldn't use their code...

You only get a thread on KF by behaving like a lolcow.

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runaround555 7 hours ago | parent [-]

>KF is a horrible place, but saying that they bullied this person into suicide is an easy scapegoat and a long stretch >You only get a thread on KF by behaving like a lolcow.

The problem with communities like that is that they leave little to no room for redemption and recovery. Once a group of obsessive nutjobs sets their sights on someone mentally vulnerable pretty much the only way is down.

Any chance to improve your life is just going to be met with an increased levels of harassment to get back the entertainment they so desperately crave. I fully believe that a lot of the more famous "lolcows" that committed suicide or spiraled down to really ugly depths weren't actually lost causes until groups like kf got involved. Just people who were a little bit weird or different who if they got off the net and touched grass for better lack of a term and not been discovered by organized gang stalkers could've lived much different lives.

Nobody deserves that level of harassment even if they are a "lolcow"

	▲	busterarm 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
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