I do not consider fighting for “free speech” in and of itself noble or worthwhile. Fuck it.
If there’s anything I’ve seen in my time here, it is how universally despised my ideology has become. What people truly want is not freedom, they want consistency and convenience. The average person wants today to be like yesterday, and tomorrow to be like today. They do not want a radical website plastering their names and photos all over the place and making fun of them for being shiteaters. Why does my relatively small forum attract an inordinate amount of hate? It inconveniences people.
The Kiwi Farms is not the thing I host that gets the most negative attention. After starting my hosting company and selling services, I’ve received only about a dozen customers. This is to be expected because my VPSs aren’t really the best, or most affordable. They are simply complaint resistant, so the sites I do get have high complaint volumes.
The site I get the most complaints about is an archive site. There is a Russian Craigslist that this website archives. I receive emails every day about this site. I get complaints via email, via Cloudflare, via tickets on my hosting service, directly through the RIR I lease my IPs from, I have people who have put my phone number on Craigslist pretending to sell things I don’t own as “revenge” for hosting this site.
Though this site has no ideas. It is not a publication. It is not some Nazi front – and indeed the sites I host with extremist ideology get far less attention – it is just a fucking archive. It just happens to have a lot of information and phone numbers people want gone and which it does not take down.
Minor convenience is far more important to people than freedom of speech.
That was the big epiphany I got to enjoy after Trump threatened Section 230. The sheer number of people I saw who have ardently enjoyed this site as a platform to be pro-Trump on, when few others afford that liberty, suddenly turn against it was shocking. It became abundantly clear that almost every single user who joined in 2019 and 2020 would gladly throw this site and everything I have ever done under the bus if it meant ‘getting back’ at Silicon Valley. If they got to call Obama a nigger on Twitter, it would be worth it to them.
This complements realizations I have made over the years regarding personal investment. The forum has fifty-thousand users, with over seven thousand logging in every day, but it is I alone who deals with the consequence. When things do get hard, people simply leave. I have seen so many people come over the years, I don’t get to know them anymore. After the hack in September, I barely recognize anyone.
Simply put, no one would ever stick their neck out for me as much as I have stuck my neck out for everyone.
While donations are on an upward trend, and Dick Masterson in particular has taken on an unbelievable burden of trying to enable me to make money through my podcast, what I do earn – even with this help – is incredibly inconsistent and not the kind of financial arrangement I can move forward in life with.
I’ve decided that generosity at personal expense is a mental disorder. I must start being selfish.
This is not a notice of closure. These are my thoughts which will impact the direction of the site moving forward. I’ve been deeply unhappy this month, perhaps more so than I have ever been since I left the United States in 2018. I find myself trapped in a tenuous and unprofitable position...
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