It wasn’t. It’s just that Josh lost the war on the PR front.
Take 4chan and anonymous for example. They are also anonymous and are feared and have bad rep, but a lot of people sided with them because they went after bad people like Scientology or terrorists. It‘s a mix of fear and respect.
Meanwhile, Josh feels all mighty and powerful telling governments to fuck off, targeting whoever he doesn’t like with a thread, and allowing /pol and 8chan rejects to flood the site.
And he allowed doxxing as a power move. Legal, or not, Let’s face it if people liked being doxxed nobody in Kiwifarms would be anonymous or worried about the hack. Plus, You would be naive to think people didn’t use the doxxing for harrasmeant. Offsite of course.
It wasn’t that hard to make them be the villains.
Which could have been avoided if Josh has just focused on it being a gossip site and marketed it as such. But he had to have his cake and eat and it, and now he is paying the consequences.
Kiwifarms reputation is so terrible Nobody is going to speak up for them. Not even the free speech anti -SJW crowd.