My aim isn't to discredit anything or anyone. To redundantly reiterate, I never heard of any of these sites/characters before this thread and don't care about them at all. If you think my characterization based on all of 10 minutes reading is wrong or garbled then hey, you're probably right; please do follow up with your own take. I do care (a bit) about whether CloudFlare is a company with stable leadership whose blog posts about policy have any meaning, and I do care (somewhat more) about the general philosophical issues surrounding free speech, the internet and the role of service providers.

What bothers me here and why I wrote up the summary is the clear role of what Matt Taibbi calls the "transitive property of whatever". When one sees a claim of "person/group X is harassing person Y so badly they killed themselves", that's a very strong accusation and the evidence needs to be crystal clear as a consequence. Yet here we have a long chain of causal reasoning that somewhat resembles Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon, and appears to stop at the first place in the chain where someone has a stable email address and might actually reply.

It's deeply unclear why this dev's demands or plea or extortion or whatever word you use for this, wouldn't also immediately apply to archive.org. The "harassment" he names is actually people in random chatrooms referring to things he himself had said online, which KF was documenting (or caching). This Keffals incident seems very similar. In fact it clearly would apply to archive.org if you read the full chain of emails and his answer to why that's not a problem is basically "i just hope it won't be cached or reuploaded anywhere".

It's also not clear why the same tactics couldn't be used against Hacker News - plenty of comments can be found on here criticizing 'personalities' of various kinds for their online antics. Just look at any thread on Elon Musk. If Musk emailed dang tomorrow and said "your users are harassing me <links to some post on another website> delete all the criticisms of me and my tweets or I'll kill myself" we wouldn't expect HN to suddenly purge thousands of posts, right? It'd be a horrible situation but a good reply might be, "please get help from a professional" or something along those lines. And we definitely would NOT want HN or every HN user to be classed as internet pond scum who need to be permanently booted off the internet.

Yes yes, you will say that's clearly different, HN posts and users are "nicer", there's more moderation etc. But it's not clearly different because nothing in this KF/byuu incident depends on any of those things. If we accept this claim at face value - that KF is a terrible place because it drives people to suicide - then this is only plausible if we rely entirely on his own perceptions/telling of the story, and he wasn't mentally stable, so theoretically he could have concluded more or less anything regardless of merit.

A lot of the philosophical issues here seem related to the EU's right to be forgotten. However I don't think the EU RTBF applies to pseudonyms. The obvious fix of just using a new pseudonym was rejected because, he claimed, he had no life whatsoever outside of that nym.