#also sorry if the perspective is a bit jank i tried some new with this drawing and I'm not 100% wit it but oh well!!!

[weekly-gordie]

Week 2 of Weekly Gordie!

[catbountry]

Just sorta wanted to say thanks for the recent KiwiFarms-leaving-apologia post. I felt like I was kind of crazy for thinking the site was a lot more mean-spirited and a lot more, well, A-log-y than it was in 2016-17. What used to be a site to mostly just go to see how wildly odd people on the internet could be just became absolutely hateful toward them, instead of just "lol, damn, who knew". Even the utility as a site where receipts for actually awful people can be stored (such as recently Isabella Janke) is a bit muddled by the plethora of threads calling at worst cringy people absolute scum of the earth, they should kill themselves.

So, yeah. Talking to another friend who lurked there, and feels the same way about KF going crazy, said that pretty much the entire internet has become shockingly more violently hateful, more blithely and pretentiously schizophrenic, in the past five-ish years. It's crazy and sad.

And for the record, I'd find you waxing at length about all the stuff you mentioned in passing in that post interesting.

Heh, thanks. Yeah, I don't know how best to be able to combat that kind toxic behavior aside from just leaving for the sake of one's own sanity. And speaking of Isabella, she did have a Rules of Nature thread put up on her, which is when Null receives a request to remove a thread from somebody that doesn't try to threaten him and instead acts in a very level-headed and polite manner. Null then leaves it up to a vote by the forum. This is something that has worked out for people in the past; a lot of people mentioned another woman who made a polite and earnest request to have her thread removed, Null made a Rules of Nature thread for this lady, and the forum voted to delete her thread. But I also got no indication that this woman did anything worse than be cringe on the internet.

Janke's request, by contrast, was overwhelmingly denied by the userbase, even though her lawyers did their best to make her appear sympathetic. This did not work and only made people feel sorry for the lawyers, at best. I even logged in myself just to vote and leave a comment because she really is just that awful and didn't show even a sliver of remorse until she got caught. Swim, fucker, swim indeed.

The sheer amount of information on Janke's actions kind of necessitates a site to act as a public record, especially one that will fight Cease and Desists by overly litigious people have threads for damn good reasons *hackcoughRusselGreercoughhack*. Janke is a legitimately dangerous individual and I still don't know how she hasn't been expelled from her school yet, given the numerous complaints about her and the fact that a quick Google search of her shows that she is a student at Texas Tech University and has all these complaints against her. Like fuck, at some point, her parent's money can't possibly seem worth it, you know? She's dead weight. It's more trouble to keep her there than it is to kick her stinky, fungus-infected ass to the curb.

But back to Kiwi Farms for a sec. As the site grows larger, the quality of the posts decrease, which is something I feel is true of just the internet in general. Older posters move on, newer posters come in and change things. I've complained about the idea of the internet being gentrified a lot, but it's usually from the perspective of corporations and advertisers trying to make the internet more palatable to a wider audience, and children, who for the record, should not be on the goddamn internet. With KF, I think a lot of older users got displaced by the people who'd been run out of larger websites for being the worst, and those that stuck around had to either adapt to these new attitudes, or be left by the wayside. This sort of thing wasn't as big of a problem online back in the days of Web 1.0. Websites were much smaller, communities were more closely knit. Kiwi Farms has gotten too big, and that problem has ballooned considerably when a flood of new people tried to join the Farms, only for Null to close registration. I don't know if it's open again, honestly. I haven't bothered to check.

I think that might be another reason I stuck around as long as I did; I just miss forum culture in general. It's very nostalgic to me, and I don't get terribly nostalgic about the 2000's... except for the internet at the time. Seeing zoomers try to describe internet forums as a format makes me feel like a fucking grandma; often they default to comparing it to Reddit, which is a lot closer to a message board than it is a forum. Having avatars to the side was like having a face and name attached to each message, making that user instantly recognizable and you could sort of form this image of this person in your head, get a feel for their personality a bit. Discussions could be longer and more nuanced and yes, this did lead to a lot of pointless flame wars and trolling, but it all seemed so harmless back then. Very few people were bold enough to try and call someone's place of work for making a bad post on the internet, and banning users for behavior on another website was a sort of emergency solution rather than something done casually as more websites are owned by the same handful of companies. Discord is the closest I've been able to get to the forum experience and it's weird because it's a chat program rather than a classic forum. But again, I'm rambling. Also I'm trying to be chipper and don't want to discuss anti-vaxxers and the incel invasion of KF right now.

Thank you for your kind message. Don't let the bastards get grind you down.