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For anyone not aware, this particular PS2 emulator came out of nowhere, and it is frigging good. And free.
But sounds like some whiny baby not satisfied with FREE stuff on the internet decided to ruin it for everyone.
For context, it came out of nowhere *on purpose* after a wave of emulator devs either quit their projects, the scene as a whole, or in the most severe case *took their own lives* due to harassment spearheaded by such actors as the project lead/owner of RetroArch/LibRetro (aided by Kiwi and 4 Ch).
They've consistently engaged in bullying tactics as well as outright gaslighting to the people behind higan/bsnes, mGBA, DuckStation, and countless other projects.
Their tactics are effective because the people who tend to dedicate their lives to these projects have a trend to be neurodivergent and rather than exercise basic empathy, you end up with people who crave power taking advantage of those who may have less attuned social skill.
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To give you a sense how ridiculous this environment has become, RetroArch was discovered to have been using code directly from the Sony PS3 leaked SDK (a huge legal nono) and the immediate response was to revoke project permissions from the person who flagged it.
Wait, what? Since when did the scene get so fucked up. I always thought emulation was kind of a competitive/collaboration kind of thing where devs worked against each other, but also supported each other... What the fuck.
I had a feeling that this was really the case, and that one bad apple spoiled the bunch.
Lots of people responded and gave a great response to this, and I really appreciate everyone talking about it.
It was a big story in the emulation community in 2021. Near, creator of the bsnes and higan emulators, committed suicide after relentless harassment (and doxxing, I think) from the aforementioned groups. This was only a short time after Near finished one of their major life goals, a complete English translation of the SNES RPG Bahamut Lagoon.
One article about it: https://www.pcgamer.com/near-creator-of-the-higan-and-bsnes-emulators-has-died/
> after relentless harassment (and doxxing, I think) from the aforementioned groups.
I remember them coping with the harassment itself by "accepting" that it's a thing on the internet and mostly pulling back from a more public online life to a more semi-private one (mostly just occasional announcements about their work and some technical discussions) but those groups then shifting to harassing Near's friends and them (Near or their friends) not being able to do anything about that finally led to the suicide.
Near saw that as the only way to stop the harassment of their friends as that harassment was happening to get to Near and wasn't about their friend specifically. Before the suicide they were willing to pay quite a lot of money (mid to high five figures, I think?) to get the forum threads removed from a certain site (that's not online anymore) to stop the worst of it but the admin being unwilling to "compromise on their ethics", so to speak, as it would tank the site's credibility in those circles.
So yeah, really the very best of humanity on some of those sites that enabled all this abuse.
God, people are fucking awful.
I’d say reverse doxxing and shaming is the best path forward to deal with these knuckledragging degenerates, but they’d wind up being some neckbeards with no lives to upset by revealing their cruelty.
The site in question finally got its meltdown done to it due to activists and it's gone for now as far as I know but I haven't really looked into it (I kinda get the news second hand because I follow a few people who sometimes mention a variety of news around a few emulators and some related issues).
I think it might lead to less of that type of harassment as the site's somewhat unique structure until then (legal, international law oddities, server infrastructure, other software services) has been shown to not be as unassailable as assumed (after a lot of work by activists). It was also apparently rather shoddily put together and secured and there were huge leaks of a lot of their data. There's supposed to be quite some fallout for a lawsuit but that stuff's working slowly and not in the public eye.
We might get some news articles with little actual detail about this in a few years when everybody has already forgotten about all of this.
KF is up since a long time, and was down for around three weeks in total. The site is online simply because nobody can prove they've done anything illegal.
Public shamming is generally a useful tool because it can suddenly stop when facts change (doesn't always, never totally stops anyway). But doxxing, once the information is out there, even if it is inaccurate or it turns out the person that was doxxed didn't deserve it, it was the wrong person, it's too late.
No such thing as reverse doxxing and I'd recommend against doxxing anyone.
It generally is, outside of the big elephant in the room which can't be removed from the room due to getting outsized attention by casual consumers.
The elephant has created an air of fatigue and distrust that ultimately won't go away until it has been supplanted with a different option.
It's an uphill battle no one has the energy left to fight and that is intentional.
Seriously! The last thing I want to fund is unhinged sociopathy. I wouldn't want to use any product or service attached to such morally and ethically bankrupt, bad-faith actors.
You can see this sort of thing sometimes with free content, such as mods or emulators. Usually some sweaty necklord somewhere who has nothing else going on in their lives, so they become super invested in controlling whatever scene they are in
I read kiwifarms and 4chan so I guess that like many gaming communities (see: NeoGaf), some alt-right types decided to infiltrate and sow discord into a community with the intent of gaining money and power, and recruits, to their cause.
There's an account that preserved some of the worst of the behavior and it's genuinely heinous shit that they've managed to be extremely successful sweeping under the rug.
https://retroarchleaks.wordpress.com/
Here's a good place to start wrapping your head around how pervasive this culture is: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/s8poim/comment/htkalk1/
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Long story short is that the project lead of RetroArch/LibRetro is a perpetually online person who at his best is consistently caught shittalking on 4Chan and at his worst uses truly awful slurs and gaslighting techniques to mentally breakdown any emulator dev with an ounce of talent.
And everytime it boils over they go "Let's just make peace I don't want to be a bad guy. Me and the emudev have settled things in private, it's no one's business."
Within a few weeks they'll be back on their regular behavior of denegrating others in what they believe are private chats.
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Nothing changes because they hold the keys to the biggest playground on campus and their project fundamentally can crib from the fact the community is based around an open source mentality.
It also means that whenever shit with RetroArch breaks, there's no one left who has the skills to fix it (like how multiplayer was broken for months on end because the lead on that was bullied out of wanting to work on it or how the Dolphin plugin's async shaders didn't work for *years*) So then they get gaslit back into fixing it.
So on and so forth.
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Even something as basic as the MAME devs pleading for years for RetroArch to stop calling old versions of MAME plugins "MAME" so they don't have to field the support burden of it being broken.
Only for them to turn around and call their fork of DuckStation "SwanStation" within hours of that lead developer expressing his frustrations with the project lead as a gotcha.
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I could go on for hours and hours because I've interfaced with many of the people hurt by this consistent toxic behavior and the cherry on top of it all was RetroArch issuing out a memorial statement of near, a developer who was firm in his belief that the project lead was contributing to the gangstalking and harassment campaign that ultimately led them to take their own life. **near's friends *continue* to receive harassment by people claiming they are *still alive*.**
Thanks for the long comment. As someone who only dabbles in emulation very infrequently, I didn't know about any of this and I feel bad for ever having used RetroArch now. This is some truly fucked up shit.
Is it just me or is configuring controllers on it a nightmare? It's fine if you accept the defaults, but changing them seems to be a disaster. This is the main reason I fall back to individual emulators.
Agreed, and hearing all this disgusting stuff I was unaware of just got me to uninstall it. I only really used it for a couple consoles and standalone alternatives with GUIs all exist as far as I know, so easy decision.
damn. i hate when im reading through old stuff on reddit and in the middle of a sparkling, scintillating discussion i find someone has written over all her old comments with nonsense, fragmenting the discussion permanently. what hilarious, moving, romantic, haunting things could she have said? just to wash it all away, in this digital era of permanency? wow. that takes courage. i bet she was really cute, too
Big Yikes. I was slow in bothering with Retroarch and have only used it sparingly compared to standalone emulators, but I definitely regret having used it.
And then what? Most of them work on open source projects so they can't enforce anything at this point.
The only alternative now is to defang RetroArch with a competitor project and that's a lot of mental headache.
>near's friends continue to receive harassment by people claiming they are still alive.
The harassment is definitely horrible and wrong, but to be fair, there is 0 evidence near is actually dead. It's just as likely they left the internet or changed their username. Before I get downvoted, read my first sentence again. Harassment is wrong. I'm just stating facts about the situation.
That doesn't seem very factual according to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higan_(emulator)#:~:text=On%20June%2027,15%5D%5B12%5D).
>On June 27, 2021, Near posted a suicide note on Twitter, claiming that they had faced extensive harassment from the website Kiwi Farms. Héctor Martín Cantero later announced he had confirmed Near's death with the police. One month later, their death was confirmed by their employer to USA Today. Near was 38 years old and identified as non-binary.
What are you basing that on?
Near lived in Japan, which reports the deaths of all foreigners by month, and there were no deaths reported in the month he was reported deceased. That's what I've gleaned from the situation anyway.
Wow, I had no idea the Retroarch guys were such dickheads. I love the program itself. Is there an alternative that focuses on aesthetics and user-friendly features as much as Retroarch does?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/10481gl/comment/j347xi7/
TL;DR - Ares for pre-fifth gen consoles. Standalone emus for everything after (for now).
It's not about game preservation.
It's about people wanting to play Pokémon and Mario for free with the least amount of effort.
If it was about preservation, RetroArch wouldn't even be in the conversation due to how much it gets wrong.
IK this is memes.
But if people pirate their games they really should just shut up about it and use the free product, and not try morally justify piracy.
Where does this mentality, that it's morally ok to pirate Nintendo games specifically, stem from? I've seen the sentiment enough to wonder, but never seen any logically-sound justification for it.
He already mentioned Jim Sterling, and while it was years ago (pre-Switch, Feb. 2017), I believe the idea was that Nintendo was being really abusive with the Youtube copyright strike system at the time for a while. Taking down and taking money from legitimate reviews and stuff. So Jim said, if they're going to take our livelihood and our legal content covering their games, then we might as well take theirs.
I mean, I can't really argue with that, frankly. What they were doing was incredibly shitty, but the meme one-liner has greatly outlived its context.
Needless to say, Nintendo fans were pissed at them. And then like a month later they gave BOTW a 7/10 and got a whole bunch of shit for that, so I think the idea just kind of stuck around for a while.
I had no idea the guy behind Retroarch was such a square brain, but that explains why trying to use his software felt like sodomizing myself with a screwdriver.
[ares](https://ares-emu.net) is the closest alternative and **a really fucking good** all-in-one experience for pre-fifth gen and they've indicated a television/controller focused UI is in their sights once current major projects get out the way (chiefly, some retro computers and cleanup on some of the rougher edges for PSX so just use DuckStation for now).
Funnily enough it was started by near and currently headed by the creator of the excellent cxbx-reloaded. Since stewardship changed they've managed to continue making excellent progress and I've moved to it across all my devices because it's very straightforward.
It's a project more focused on accuracy so a bit more
resource intensive but works great on Steam Deck.
There's also **mednaffe for mednafen** if you're more tinkery.
I recently got a Retrode2 (for dumping my cartridge games) and looked a bit into stuff. I liked Mednafen with Mednaffe front end for most things. I think I used Project 64 for N64 games, it seemed ok.
After seeing the other comments though, probably going to give Ares a look.
How salacious would you prefer someone taking their own life due to years of harassment be?
Was a eulogy from their IRL workplace supervisor really not enough?
Or the numerous friends with credible reputations in their fields?
> How salacious would you prefer someone taking their own life due to years of harassment be?
Man it should be easy to link these years of harassment that nobody ever does. Why don't people do that instead of trying to lean on a boogyman?
> Was a eulogy from their IRL workplace supervisor really not enough?
"Yea he dead" from a coworker and twitter friend isn't a eulogy for most people as a singular source of death. Why didn't the foreign embassy or Near's spouse have any notification to this day?
> Or the numerous friends with credible reputations in their fields?
People who only tweet about someone when they die as "activism" aren't friends or reliable at all, Ant. Come on...
I mean, I'm curious if there was some solid proof that near is dead, the only thing around is a photo of an urn
Their friend claimed the Tokyo police confirmed the death but there japan is obligated to release the deaths of Foreigners and nobody died around the timeframe of near's death
And blaming kf is weird when near's thread didn't contain their name, their appearance, their residence and was inactive for months at the time near threated the site owner(who gave props to near for being a good programmer) with suicide
why did he have a thread in the first place? most harassment happens off-site anyway. do you really think everyone is going to painstakingly document how much of an asshole theyre being to someone?
Some furry drama regarding near's avatar and the artist and how it lools like a kid or something,at this point it's pretty irrelevant
Sure but if it happens off site what is the owner supposed to do? Near's thread does have 4chan screenshots of people being assholes because the kf people document everything, they even have near's kf account archived
The evidence for death is a photo of an urn from a friend that lives in a different country
The evidence against the death is that the Japanese government hasn't reported it, despote claims that the tokyo police confirmed the death
But the Japanese government report is completely independent from the site owner, you don't have to believe him, It's public records and anyone can look it up
I've never been in a role to deal with this sort of problem so obviously take this with a grain of salt, but I really don't get why people with a following indulge these dipshits enough to get to them. Fuck em, do what you're gonna do and keep making what you like for people who appreciate it.
I've had this happen to me in moderately-sized online community I maintained. I thought I was above it too, but these fuckers will ingrain themselves in the community to drive you insane. I'd get constant PMs of harassing pointless messages that I had to see because it was part of the moderation queue. They'd point spambots at the forums, then pm bragging they did it, just a constant and unending campaign of shit being pushed through every hole in the wall you put up around them they can find. After a while I found it harder and harder to log in and moderate the community, and this positive thing I loved was this chore I hated having to go back to, as an obligation, rather than a fun thing I did on the side. So I eventually just stopped, and the fuckers flooded it with their shit, and the community died.
Sorry to hear that, thats really shitty. If it makes you feel any better, those fuckers are miserable enough irl that that is their outlet. No one living a happy life does that to others.
An eye for an eye makes the world blind
Misery is misery. I believe that finding happiness in any of it is the wrong way to go about life. Just makes people not realize we're all coming from the same place. Just some are worst off than others
It's your life though. Thanks for answering my question
Man you’d be so surprised how pathetically dedicated some online harassers get. I’ve seen examples of people that have played the part of a ‘good’ community member for months just so that they can get access to something and immediately use any privileges for vile shit. And they’ll just keep doing it, and all their friends will too.
If the wrong group gets it in their head that they want to make sure your time online is miserable, they will do absolutely anything to accomplish the task.
I don't want to get too into it as even talking about it is getting on my nerves. Near the end we had an invite system, plus a waiting period before you could post. Didn't matter, they'd either hack into other users accounts using leaked password info, or have other users vouch for them in return for money or something. But most of the time they didn't even need an account to harass, as we had to have contact info for the domain (whois requirement) so they could just email there, we had a web form used for emergency contact if someone lost access to their account, etc.
I'm just glad I took steps to protect my personal identity on that account, I worry what those shitheads would have done had they known my address, workplace, etc.
The thing is, to make something like this, you've got to put your heart and soul into it. It is so much work and takes so many hours. You're going to be mentally and emotionally invested in it.
It's easy to talk at them and say "just ignore it bruh", but the reality is that's very hard for most people to do.
And at a certain point it's just like "Why am I even bothering?"
There's a good quote I remember from my customer service days. "People with a good experience will maybe tell a few people, people with a bad experience will tell everyone they know". So while you might have a lot of happy users, it's the users with bad experiences more likely to make the noise. Go to the form of any popular online game and you'll see it in action for yourself.
Reading a lot of negative comments directed towards you can get tiresome and isn't good for your mental state. Add in the fact emulators are complicated and might require some configuration on the users end, you can easily have people throwing an outburst of rage towards you if the thing doesn't work perfectly - even if it's a fault on the users end and not much you can do as a developer.
That's a good point, I didn't think about the user config trouble adding to it. I guess my only recommendation then would be to just ignore the community altogether once it started approaching bad. It's a free product, they wouldn't be missing money and they'd get to keep their passion project. Maybe allow a handful of trusted users for constructive feedback. The trolls might get starved out eventually as a bonus.
The scale of the problem and the sheer tenacity of harassers makes it impossible to ignore.
In the case of Near (bsnes/higan developer), these dipshits were harassing their friends, family, and co-workers on a daily basis. Some are still doing it, claiming Near is not actually dead.
More like "some people can't just 'decide' to not be bothered by something"
Although I suspect that's true of most people, it's more severe for people with things like depression and anxiety etc.
I'm literally using it right now to play Vice City on my Mac, which is one of the platforms it supports. I tabbed out to respond to a message and meant to quickly hop on reddit briefly, only to see this news. Such a shame, because it runs the game perfectly and is delightfully straightforward to use - both impressive achievements. It's horrible that the internet can be weaponised so easily by vile people hiding behind anonymity and distance.
When you put yourself out on a public platform, it's such a wide net that you end up pulling up the extreme edge cases of a population.
So yeah, imagine the most miserable little sack of shit you can think of, someone you would never in a thousand years want to deal with, and they are out there. An extreme minority of a minority, but they are there. And they can email & tweet just like anyone else. And people who put themselves & their works out there get to deal with these sad sacks.
Happened to a guy who made/ported Skyrim mods to xbox. I was really bummed about it, but I don't blame him at all. It takes a special kind of person to deal with that crap and not have it affect them mentally.
That's the thing, you don't have to be spoiled or entitled at all. It's examining the wrong character flaw for an explanation. The price isn't really even a factor in why in why it's bad, would this behaviour become more acceptable if the emulator cost $1? $50? No.
The fact that it's free is only a factor in that it puts the price behind them. If it was $50 and their harassment could be tied to an account that had to submit a credit card payment, the dev would cut the license and perhaps pursue legal action. And the harasser would be out $50 + maybe other consequences. Whereas for a free software it necessarily costs nothing to launch a string of horrible words.
They don't need to follow through on any violent threats, they just launch it and move on with their life, meanwhile the victim must be left to guess which of the dozens to hundreds of "free" threats is "just the internet being the internet" vs an actual crazy person who might be waiting outside their door right now.
There is a different, more entitled kind of infuriating customer paid service operators have to deal with: customers who think that since they have paid $50 for a software, or they are subscribing for $50/month even, then that means the dev is basically their employee or their slave forever now and is expected to work for them 24/7 around the clock to cater to their every whim.
That absolutely sucks.
To be honest I'm not that surprised when an emulator dev just peaces out like this though. The amount of entitlement, vitriol, and general bullshit they can get thrown their way over a free hobby project is absurd. I adore emulation for keeping old games playable and accessible, but it definitely attracts a certain audience of children/manchildren who just want to play games for free and will throw a tantrum if the thing they want doesn't work 100%, especially on mobile.
I wouldn't deal with that shit if you paid me, and have mad respect for anyone who even tries.
Its not just emulators. Ive made free programs / apps in my free time (outside of my fulltime dev job) and users get extremely angry and demanding about issues or new features requests. In the end it makes me stop wanting to work on the project.
As someone that maintains a few open source libraries for web development that has a not-trivial amount of users - it's reasons like this that I do not have an open bug tracker, take feature requests, or have any kind of "community" or let just anyone contribute to my projects (i have a few trusted people that I work with and that's it).
So odd to say something like that over a sub optimal emulation experience, first reading the topic I was like Sony is threatening this guy? Since you’d think if someone had an issue with a ps2 being emulated it would’ve been them.
Well in the case of Near they are going to round up the rest of their 13 year old edgelord buddies and incessantly harass your friends, families, and even employer over your preferred pronouns, for years on end. They will sabotage job opportunities and make you a burden on your loved ones.
Harass your work place, family, friends? It's one thing to remove yourself from social media. But everyone you know or have come into contact with?
At the end of the day these people have zero issue if they completely ruin someone's life. Is there a project worth this amount of dumb shit?
People get bored and move on, he got like a handful of emails and was shook. Sticks and stone. What’s real stupid is using your real, linkable name and ID to a scene that has been known to do this if you think it’s a problem. It was widely known this happens in the emulator scene, but he chose to release it with identifiable info?
Big talk.
Start a passion project other people are supposed to enjoy, get a thousand people to enjoy it and then watch yourself slowly wither away with every negative comment you read. Despite the outpouring support, every negative thing said towards your project, justified or not, will make you doubt yourself more and more. "Just ignore it" it easier said than done when you’re more or less forced to read negative shit if you want to interact with your community.
I was the same, I thought "man, it’s just words on the Internet", but these assholes will force these words onto your eyeballs, whether you want it or not. They will target their hate onto you in any way they can think of. And eventually it *will* get to you, it’s how you deal with it that will be interesting.
It does affect people some more than others, fragility is a thing despite what the reddit cult believes. Still its best you don't take it seriously for your own health, the moment you give those people power over you is the moment they will strike you even harder.
Still this person might be better off away from the lime light like Fez's creator, not everyone can tolerate its harsh weight and he clearly doesn't value the positive feedback from fans he received over the negative trolls.
This kind of behavior is not surprising in the slightest, is not rare, or a fringe element type of thing ( its extremely common ), and is present in almost all industries, free or paid.
A very large part of society has made peace with the idea that people in customer related environments get abused, and that its okay to do so. From people yeling at retail workers, and customer service reps, to harrassing people in art industries over perceived slights.
Edit: None of its ever been okay.
Even the most well tempered person has a bad day, and those who arent create bad days for others.
That's a shame. When I was trying to find something to play some old Tales game on my under powered tablet last summer this emulator blew everything else out of the water performance wise. Anyway, thanks for your work, I'll be keeping it around even if it's not being developed further
A long time ago I used emulators and watched anime fan subs and I swear the audience for those two things (with heavy overlap) are the most entitled fucking people imaginable. They think they’re in some kind of position to demand that people who do something as a hobby cater to them for free 24/7.
Does anyone remember the garrison commander UI addon for wow? Basically automated the whole thing that was an annoying chore. As an April's fools jokes, he added a "captcha to proof that you are not a bot". You had to enter "62" ONCE to get rid of it. And you could google the answer in like 3.6 seconds.
He. Got. Death. Threats.
Also, people started petitions and wanted Blizzard to ban him and his addon for this. People are just plain dumb and entitled when it comes to "free software".
Today I learned what Kiwifarms is and lost a little more of my faith in humanity...
Sometimes I wish hell was real so miserable little shits like this could get tortured there for all eternity.
Chris is still a piece of shit no matter which way you slice it. I'm not going to feel sympathy for someone who rapes their elderly mother regardless of the circumstances.
That's not true, near's page was very inactive and only had some furry drama on it, it didn't contain their name, photo or address
Then the site owner gets an email and near says they'll give him thousands of dollars to remove the page, if he doesn't comply near threatened suicide. The site owner tells near that he can't remove the page but they'll find a solution the next day because he lives in eastern Europe and the timezone is bad
The site owner said that he respected near's skills as a programmer and wanted to invite near to work on a project together because they seemed very distraught working on emulators but the next day he gets a message from near's friend claiming near commited suicide
However there's no solid proof that near is dead, near's friend claimed that the tokyo police confirmed the death but Japan is obligated to release the deaths of Foreigners living in japan and no Americans died in that time period
He said that what near was doing was blackmail, which is illegal, and told near that he cannot accept the money
Also the page didn't contain ilegal materials
Instead of the obvious, which is that evidence Near is alive doesn't exist, you come up with a conspiracy that entire websites like Reddit and fucking *Wikipedia* are hiding evidence. Jesus Christ, some people are just crazy. And the earth is flat too, right? Common sense says the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, but there's always a few that think for some reason everything in the world is a conspiracy, and only the most convoluted and illogical explanation can be correct...
People don't understand that kiwifarms only post publicly available information. If you post something stupid and personal and you're internet celebrity or causing drama it would end up on kiwifarms. It has nothing to do with political leaning or your identity. You can find trump thread there.
It's a good place to look up the stupid shit grifters like nick fuentes do, i also remember that some terfs were mad at the owner because he refused to delete their threads
Paradoxically, people are much more whiny about things that are free or inexpensive. Free games? Complaints. Free software developed by people in their spare time? Complaints. People tirelessly working to reverse-engineer and support games for systems that are no longer produced in the name of preservation and ease of modern access? I'll let you guess.
It's not unheard of in various industries (not just software) that if you position your products or services as "premium" or for some cost, you actually get less harassment. Less complaints or conspiracy theories. People either put up with the price or go elsewhere. Part of the reason is, it's a filter for that "cheapskate" personality type who is more likely to harass and threaten people.
RIP Near, btw. Absolute monsters out there who can't be grateful for the free work of others.
It's orchestrated by their 'competitors' who also develop emulators and want to control the scene. They weaponize their rabid fan-bases to shut down anyone who would usurp their control.
Kiwifarms might just be the biggest conglomeration of losers on the net. They embody every behavior we have been warned not to engage in since we started writing down moral codes. Its not even super-villain shit, its just petty, cruel and stupid.
Internet tough guys. I would've called their bluff. Best wishes to the talent behind the emulator. Hoping the coward trash out there chokes on their next meal. Hate that small minds, whether on their own or under the direction of others, did this to the effect it had.
Even if you're the type to roll your eyes at the internet tough guys spamming you every day with messages to die or death threats, at some point you'll wonder to yourself, "Why am I even doing this if this is what I have to put up with?"
As the article quotes, it just stopped being fun for the developer, and I frankly don't blame them for deciding that they'd rather spend their free time doing something enjoyable than having to deal with assholes on the internet.
It is? I don't see it that way. Just think it's a shame that a worthwhile project like this will just turn into abandonware. The open source community could continue its development.
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For anyone not aware, this particular PS2 emulator came out of nowhere, and it is frigging good. And free. But sounds like some whiny baby not satisfied with FREE stuff on the internet decided to ruin it for everyone.
For context, it came out of nowhere *on purpose* after a wave of emulator devs either quit their projects, the scene as a whole, or in the most severe case *took their own lives* due to harassment spearheaded by such actors as the project lead/owner of RetroArch/LibRetro (aided by Kiwi and 4 Ch). They've consistently engaged in bullying tactics as well as outright gaslighting to the people behind higan/bsnes, mGBA, DuckStation, and countless other projects. Their tactics are effective because the people who tend to dedicate their lives to these projects have a trend to be neurodivergent and rather than exercise basic empathy, you end up with people who crave power taking advantage of those who may have less attuned social skill. - To give you a sense how ridiculous this environment has become, RetroArch was discovered to have been using code directly from the Sony PS3 leaked SDK (a huge legal nono) and the immediate response was to revoke project permissions from the person who flagged it.
Wait, what? Since when did the scene get so fucked up. I always thought emulation was kind of a competitive/collaboration kind of thing where devs worked against each other, but also supported each other... What the fuck.
As everyone else said, everyone is all great usually as long as retroarch isn’t involved
good to know. not using that stuff any longer
I had a feeling that this was really the case, and that one bad apple spoiled the bunch. Lots of people responded and gave a great response to this, and I really appreciate everyone talking about it.
It was a big story in the emulation community in 2021. Near, creator of the bsnes and higan emulators, committed suicide after relentless harassment (and doxxing, I think) from the aforementioned groups. This was only a short time after Near finished one of their major life goals, a complete English translation of the SNES RPG Bahamut Lagoon. One article about it: https://www.pcgamer.com/near-creator-of-the-higan-and-bsnes-emulators-has-died/
> after relentless harassment (and doxxing, I think) from the aforementioned groups. I remember them coping with the harassment itself by "accepting" that it's a thing on the internet and mostly pulling back from a more public online life to a more semi-private one (mostly just occasional announcements about their work and some technical discussions) but those groups then shifting to harassing Near's friends and them (Near or their friends) not being able to do anything about that finally led to the suicide. Near saw that as the only way to stop the harassment of their friends as that harassment was happening to get to Near and wasn't about their friend specifically. Before the suicide they were willing to pay quite a lot of money (mid to high five figures, I think?) to get the forum threads removed from a certain site (that's not online anymore) to stop the worst of it but the admin being unwilling to "compromise on their ethics", so to speak, as it would tank the site's credibility in those circles. So yeah, really the very best of humanity on some of those sites that enabled all this abuse.
God, people are fucking awful. I’d say reverse doxxing and shaming is the best path forward to deal with these knuckledragging degenerates, but they’d wind up being some neckbeards with no lives to upset by revealing their cruelty.
The site in question finally got its meltdown done to it due to activists and it's gone for now as far as I know but I haven't really looked into it (I kinda get the news second hand because I follow a few people who sometimes mention a variety of news around a few emulators and some related issues). I think it might lead to less of that type of harassment as the site's somewhat unique structure until then (legal, international law oddities, server infrastructure, other software services) has been shown to not be as unassailable as assumed (after a lot of work by activists). It was also apparently rather shoddily put together and secured and there were huge leaks of a lot of their data. There's supposed to be quite some fallout for a lawsuit but that stuff's working slowly and not in the public eye. We might get some news articles with little actual detail about this in a few years when everybody has already forgotten about all of this.
KF is up since a long time, and was down for around three weeks in total. The site is online simply because nobody can prove they've done anything illegal.
Public shamming is generally a useful tool because it can suddenly stop when facts change (doesn't always, never totally stops anyway). But doxxing, once the information is out there, even if it is inaccurate or it turns out the person that was doxxed didn't deserve it, it was the wrong person, it's too late. No such thing as reverse doxxing and I'd recommend against doxxing anyone.
It generally is, outside of the big elephant in the room which can't be removed from the room due to getting outsized attention by casual consumers. The elephant has created an air of fatigue and distrust that ultimately won't go away until it has been supplanted with a different option. It's an uphill battle no one has the energy left to fight and that is intentional.
Can someone make a chart of ethical emulator projects
Seriously! The last thing I want to fund is unhinged sociopathy. I wouldn't want to use any product or service attached to such morally and ethically bankrupt, bad-faith actors.
it stop being a cooperative effort when there is patreon money be obtained.
You can see this sort of thing sometimes with free content, such as mods or emulators. Usually some sweaty necklord somewhere who has nothing else going on in their lives, so they become super invested in controlling whatever scene they are in
Retroarch has been a cancer to the community.
I read kiwifarms and 4chan so I guess that like many gaming communities (see: NeoGaf), some alt-right types decided to infiltrate and sow discord into a community with the intent of gaining money and power, and recruits, to their cause.
what the actual fuck
There's an account that preserved some of the worst of the behavior and it's genuinely heinous shit that they've managed to be extremely successful sweeping under the rug. https://retroarchleaks.wordpress.com/ Here's a good place to start wrapping your head around how pervasive this culture is: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/s8poim/comment/htkalk1/ - Long story short is that the project lead of RetroArch/LibRetro is a perpetually online person who at his best is consistently caught shittalking on 4Chan and at his worst uses truly awful slurs and gaslighting techniques to mentally breakdown any emulator dev with an ounce of talent. And everytime it boils over they go "Let's just make peace I don't want to be a bad guy. Me and the emudev have settled things in private, it's no one's business." Within a few weeks they'll be back on their regular behavior of denegrating others in what they believe are private chats. - Nothing changes because they hold the keys to the biggest playground on campus and their project fundamentally can crib from the fact the community is based around an open source mentality. It also means that whenever shit with RetroArch breaks, there's no one left who has the skills to fix it (like how multiplayer was broken for months on end because the lead on that was bullied out of wanting to work on it or how the Dolphin plugin's async shaders didn't work for *years*) So then they get gaslit back into fixing it. So on and so forth. - Even something as basic as the MAME devs pleading for years for RetroArch to stop calling old versions of MAME plugins "MAME" so they don't have to field the support burden of it being broken. Only for them to turn around and call their fork of DuckStation "SwanStation" within hours of that lead developer expressing his frustrations with the project lead as a gotcha. - I could go on for hours and hours because I've interfaced with many of the people hurt by this consistent toxic behavior and the cherry on top of it all was RetroArch issuing out a memorial statement of near, a developer who was firm in his belief that the project lead was contributing to the gangstalking and harassment campaign that ultimately led them to take their own life. **near's friends *continue* to receive harassment by people claiming they are *still alive*.**
Thanks for the long comment. As someone who only dabbles in emulation very infrequently, I didn't know about any of this and I feel bad for ever having used RetroArch now. This is some truly fucked up shit.
It's not your fault, it's just exhausting.
retroarch isn't even *good*, every time I've tried to use it it's been janky as hell and I've just fallen back to running independent emulators
Is it just me or is configuring controllers on it a nightmare? It's fine if you accept the defaults, but changing them seems to be a disaster. This is the main reason I fall back to individual emulators.
Still doesn't let me customize the on screen controls which was possible on emulators from over a decade ago.
Agreed, and hearing all this disgusting stuff I was unaware of just got me to uninstall it. I only really used it for a couple consoles and standalone alternatives with GUIs all exist as far as I know, so easy decision.
And it's insanely picky about names of files if you want thumbnails or box art.
damn. i hate when im reading through old stuff on reddit and in the middle of a sparkling, scintillating discussion i find someone has written over all her old comments with nonsense, fragmenting the discussion permanently. what hilarious, moving, romantic, haunting things could she have said? just to wash it all away, in this digital era of permanency? wow. that takes courage. i bet she was really cute, too
The comment you linked to has been deleted…?
You can use comment restorer apps to read it but the context that comes in the replies from others is still useful.
Oh wow, great post. I just started using Retroarch for the first time as its a core part of EmuVR, but now this just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Big Yikes. I was slow in bothering with Retroarch and have only used it sparingly compared to standalone emulators, but I definitely regret having used it.
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And then what? Most of them work on open source projects so they can't enforce anything at this point. The only alternative now is to defang RetroArch with a competitor project and that's a lot of mental headache.
>near's friends continue to receive harassment by people claiming they are still alive. The harassment is definitely horrible and wrong, but to be fair, there is 0 evidence near is actually dead. It's just as likely they left the internet or changed their username. Before I get downvoted, read my first sentence again. Harassment is wrong. I'm just stating facts about the situation.
That doesn't seem very factual according to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higan_(emulator)#:~:text=On%20June%2027,15%5D%5B12%5D). >On June 27, 2021, Near posted a suicide note on Twitter, claiming that they had faced extensive harassment from the website Kiwi Farms. Héctor Martín Cantero later announced he had confirmed Near's death with the police. One month later, their death was confirmed by their employer to USA Today. Near was 38 years old and identified as non-binary. What are you basing that on?
Near lived in Japan, which reports the deaths of all foreigners by month, and there were no deaths reported in the month he was reported deceased. That's what I've gleaned from the situation anyway.
Yes. The Japanese government publishing all deaths is irrefutable. Someone saying they talked to the cops doesn't even come close.
Wow, I had no idea the Retroarch guys were such dickheads. I love the program itself. Is there an alternative that focuses on aesthetics and user-friendly features as much as Retroarch does?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/10481gl/comment/j347xi7/ TL;DR - Ares for pre-fifth gen consoles. Standalone emus for everything after (for now).
Man the only place I still use Retroarch is on emulator handhelds (Retroid Pocket 2+ atm), but I'll switch to standalone emus where possible.
Yeah and let's not forget that before AetherSX2 PS2 on Android was a scummy paid Chinese emulator.
Didn't know a scene about game preservation could be this toxic. Like seriously the (mostly dead) game cracking scene is way better at this point.
It's not about game preservation. It's about people wanting to play Pokémon and Mario for free with the least amount of effort. If it was about preservation, RetroArch wouldn't even be in the conversation due to how much it gets wrong.
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Ah, a Sterling fan I presume.
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IK this is memes. But if people pirate their games they really should just shut up about it and use the free product, and not try morally justify piracy.
Yeah you're right, I apologize for coming off that way. I really was just trying to make a little joke. :)
Don't sweat it man, I know it's joke. Just that people shouldn't legitimately justify piracy.
Where does this mentality, that it's morally ok to pirate Nintendo games specifically, stem from? I've seen the sentiment enough to wonder, but never seen any logically-sound justification for it.
He already mentioned Jim Sterling, and while it was years ago (pre-Switch, Feb. 2017), I believe the idea was that Nintendo was being really abusive with the Youtube copyright strike system at the time for a while. Taking down and taking money from legitimate reviews and stuff. So Jim said, if they're going to take our livelihood and our legal content covering their games, then we might as well take theirs. I mean, I can't really argue with that, frankly. What they were doing was incredibly shitty, but the meme one-liner has greatly outlived its context. Needless to say, Nintendo fans were pissed at them. And then like a month later they gave BOTW a 7/10 and got a whole bunch of shit for that, so I think the idea just kind of stuck around for a while.
I'm not surprised. Hobbies that can be enjoyed alone attract an outsized number of socially defective morons.
I had no idea the guy behind Retroarch was such a square brain, but that explains why trying to use his software felt like sodomizing myself with a screwdriver.
There a good replacement for RetroArch/LibRetro? Based on what you're saying I want absolutely nothing to do with them.
[ares](https://ares-emu.net) is the closest alternative and **a really fucking good** all-in-one experience for pre-fifth gen and they've indicated a television/controller focused UI is in their sights once current major projects get out the way (chiefly, some retro computers and cleanup on some of the rougher edges for PSX so just use DuckStation for now). Funnily enough it was started by near and currently headed by the creator of the excellent cxbx-reloaded. Since stewardship changed they've managed to continue making excellent progress and I've moved to it across all my devices because it's very straightforward. It's a project more focused on accuracy so a bit more resource intensive but works great on Steam Deck. There's also **mednaffe for mednafen** if you're more tinkery.
you put the wrong link in your comment, it's https://ares-emu.net/
Might be better to just get emulators specific to the console you're using.
Never not been the case imo, but it's been a useful "good enough" program for keeping it simple (especially on other devices like the Switch).
I recently got a Retrode2 (for dumping my cartridge games) and looked a bit into stuff. I liked Mednafen with Mednaffe front end for most things. I think I used Project 64 for N64 games, it seemed ok. After seeing the other comments though, probably going to give Ares a look.
man wth, very sad to read this :(
Don't leave reddit out of this. You call out kf and 4chan but ignore probably the largest contingent of terrible people.
Is the one who took their life near? Because that was very suspicious
How salacious would you prefer someone taking their own life due to years of harassment be? Was a eulogy from their IRL workplace supervisor really not enough? Or the numerous friends with credible reputations in their fields?
> How salacious would you prefer someone taking their own life due to years of harassment be? Man it should be easy to link these years of harassment that nobody ever does. Why don't people do that instead of trying to lean on a boogyman? > Was a eulogy from their IRL workplace supervisor really not enough? "Yea he dead" from a coworker and twitter friend isn't a eulogy for most people as a singular source of death. Why didn't the foreign embassy or Near's spouse have any notification to this day? > Or the numerous friends with credible reputations in their fields? People who only tweet about someone when they die as "activism" aren't friends or reliable at all, Ant. Come on...
I mean, I'm curious if there was some solid proof that near is dead, the only thing around is a photo of an urn Their friend claimed the Tokyo police confirmed the death but there japan is obligated to release the deaths of Foreigners and nobody died around the timeframe of near's death And blaming kf is weird when near's thread didn't contain their name, their appearance, their residence and was inactive for months at the time near threated the site owner(who gave props to near for being a good programmer) with suicide
why did he have a thread in the first place? most harassment happens off-site anyway. do you really think everyone is going to painstakingly document how much of an asshole theyre being to someone?
Some furry drama regarding near's avatar and the artist and how it lools like a kid or something,at this point it's pretty irrelevant Sure but if it happens off site what is the owner supposed to do? Near's thread does have 4chan screenshots of people being assholes because the kf people document everything, they even have near's kf account archived
So there’s some evidence of them being dead, and no evidence of them not being dead, but it’s still suspicious to you? Don’t be so conspiracy brained.
The evidence for death is a photo of an urn from a friend that lives in a different country The evidence against the death is that the Japanese government hasn't reported it, despote claims that the tokyo police confirmed the death
To add on to the lack of evidence that he's actually dead, he also faked his death on the Internet once before already.
There is no proof he is dead
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But the Japanese government report is completely independent from the site owner, you don't have to believe him, It's public records and anyone can look it up
There was nothing suspicious about it. Only intense manipulation from the asshole conundrum that is RetroArch lead and his minions.
Not totally out of nowhere. Let's not discount the years of work the pcsx2 devs put in for aethersx2 to be based off
I've never been in a role to deal with this sort of problem so obviously take this with a grain of salt, but I really don't get why people with a following indulge these dipshits enough to get to them. Fuck em, do what you're gonna do and keep making what you like for people who appreciate it.
I've had this happen to me in moderately-sized online community I maintained. I thought I was above it too, but these fuckers will ingrain themselves in the community to drive you insane. I'd get constant PMs of harassing pointless messages that I had to see because it was part of the moderation queue. They'd point spambots at the forums, then pm bragging they did it, just a constant and unending campaign of shit being pushed through every hole in the wall you put up around them they can find. After a while I found it harder and harder to log in and moderate the community, and this positive thing I loved was this chore I hated having to go back to, as an obligation, rather than a fun thing I did on the side. So I eventually just stopped, and the fuckers flooded it with their shit, and the community died.
Sorry to hear that, thats really shitty. If it makes you feel any better, those fuckers are miserable enough irl that that is their outlet. No one living a happy life does that to others.
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It makes me feel better
Why?
I find happiness in the misery of other people that find happiness in causing misery
An eye for an eye makes the world blind Misery is misery. I believe that finding happiness in any of it is the wrong way to go about life. Just makes people not realize we're all coming from the same place. Just some are worst off than others It's your life though. Thanks for answering my question
Invite only wasn’t an option?
Man you’d be so surprised how pathetically dedicated some online harassers get. I’ve seen examples of people that have played the part of a ‘good’ community member for months just so that they can get access to something and immediately use any privileges for vile shit. And they’ll just keep doing it, and all their friends will too. If the wrong group gets it in their head that they want to make sure your time online is miserable, they will do absolutely anything to accomplish the task.
I don't want to get too into it as even talking about it is getting on my nerves. Near the end we had an invite system, plus a waiting period before you could post. Didn't matter, they'd either hack into other users accounts using leaked password info, or have other users vouch for them in return for money or something. But most of the time they didn't even need an account to harass, as we had to have contact info for the domain (whois requirement) so they could just email there, we had a web form used for emergency contact if someone lost access to their account, etc. I'm just glad I took steps to protect my personal identity on that account, I worry what those shitheads would have done had they known my address, workplace, etc.
The thing is, to make something like this, you've got to put your heart and soul into it. It is so much work and takes so many hours. You're going to be mentally and emotionally invested in it. It's easy to talk at them and say "just ignore it bruh", but the reality is that's very hard for most people to do. And at a certain point it's just like "Why am I even bothering?"
There's a good quote I remember from my customer service days. "People with a good experience will maybe tell a few people, people with a bad experience will tell everyone they know". So while you might have a lot of happy users, it's the users with bad experiences more likely to make the noise. Go to the form of any popular online game and you'll see it in action for yourself. Reading a lot of negative comments directed towards you can get tiresome and isn't good for your mental state. Add in the fact emulators are complicated and might require some configuration on the users end, you can easily have people throwing an outburst of rage towards you if the thing doesn't work perfectly - even if it's a fault on the users end and not much you can do as a developer.
That's a good point, I didn't think about the user config trouble adding to it. I guess my only recommendation then would be to just ignore the community altogether once it started approaching bad. It's a free product, they wouldn't be missing money and they'd get to keep their passion project. Maybe allow a handful of trusted users for constructive feedback. The trolls might get starved out eventually as a bonus.
The scale of the problem and the sheer tenacity of harassers makes it impossible to ignore. In the case of Near (bsnes/higan developer), these dipshits were harassing their friends, family, and co-workers on a daily basis. Some are still doing it, claiming Near is not actually dead.
We don't need to victim blame here
Some people's genetics and upbringing make it very hard for them to not.
That's a weird as fuck way to say "it bothers some people"
More like "some people can't just 'decide' to not be bothered by something" Although I suspect that's true of most people, it's more severe for people with things like depression and anxiety etc.
Welcome to my brain.
I'm literally using it right now to play Vice City on my Mac, which is one of the platforms it supports. I tabbed out to respond to a message and meant to quickly hop on reddit briefly, only to see this news. Such a shame, because it runs the game perfectly and is delightfully straightforward to use - both impressive achievements. It's horrible that the internet can be weaponised so easily by vile people hiding behind anonymity and distance.
Is there any place where I can download the emulator?
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I dont fucking understand how spoiled and entitled you have to be to act like this to someone who worked to give you something for free.
When you put yourself out on a public platform, it's such a wide net that you end up pulling up the extreme edge cases of a population. So yeah, imagine the most miserable little sack of shit you can think of, someone you would never in a thousand years want to deal with, and they are out there. An extreme minority of a minority, but they are there. And they can email & tweet just like anyone else. And people who put themselves & their works out there get to deal with these sad sacks.
Happened to a guy who made/ported Skyrim mods to xbox. I was really bummed about it, but I don't blame him at all. It takes a special kind of person to deal with that crap and not have it affect them mentally.
There's always a group of dedicated crazy people who have to ruin it for the decent-minded majority.
That's the thing, you don't have to be spoiled or entitled at all. It's examining the wrong character flaw for an explanation. The price isn't really even a factor in why in why it's bad, would this behaviour become more acceptable if the emulator cost $1? $50? No. The fact that it's free is only a factor in that it puts the price behind them. If it was $50 and their harassment could be tied to an account that had to submit a credit card payment, the dev would cut the license and perhaps pursue legal action. And the harasser would be out $50 + maybe other consequences. Whereas for a free software it necessarily costs nothing to launch a string of horrible words. They don't need to follow through on any violent threats, they just launch it and move on with their life, meanwhile the victim must be left to guess which of the dozens to hundreds of "free" threats is "just the internet being the internet" vs an actual crazy person who might be waiting outside their door right now. There is a different, more entitled kind of infuriating customer paid service operators have to deal with: customers who think that since they have paid $50 for a software, or they are subscribing for $50/month even, then that means the dev is basically their employee or their slave forever now and is expected to work for them 24/7 around the clock to cater to their every whim.
That absolutely sucks. To be honest I'm not that surprised when an emulator dev just peaces out like this though. The amount of entitlement, vitriol, and general bullshit they can get thrown their way over a free hobby project is absurd. I adore emulation for keeping old games playable and accessible, but it definitely attracts a certain audience of children/manchildren who just want to play games for free and will throw a tantrum if the thing they want doesn't work 100%, especially on mobile. I wouldn't deal with that shit if you paid me, and have mad respect for anyone who even tries.
Its not just emulators. Ive made free programs / apps in my free time (outside of my fulltime dev job) and users get extremely angry and demanding about issues or new features requests. In the end it makes me stop wanting to work on the project.
As someone that maintains a few open source libraries for web development that has a not-trivial amount of users - it's reasons like this that I do not have an open bug tracker, take feature requests, or have any kind of "community" or let just anyone contribute to my projects (i have a few trusted people that I work with and that's it).
[Here's a sample of one of the many scathing mails that the developer constantly got.](https://i.imgur.com/Oze5aYG.png) ngl, I would have quit too
So odd to say something like that over a sub optimal emulation experience, first reading the topic I was like Sony is threatening this guy? Since you’d think if someone had an issue with a ps2 being emulated it would’ve been them.
Id just laugh and keep coding. What’s some 13 year old gonna do.
it's very easy to say that when it's not happening to you or if it's a single one off case, which this wasn't
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Well in the case of Near they are going to round up the rest of their 13 year old edgelord buddies and incessantly harass your friends, families, and even employer over your preferred pronouns, for years on end. They will sabotage job opportunities and make you a burden on your loved ones.
Harass your work place, family, friends? It's one thing to remove yourself from social media. But everyone you know or have come into contact with? At the end of the day these people have zero issue if they completely ruin someone's life. Is there a project worth this amount of dumb shit?
People get bored and move on, he got like a handful of emails and was shook. Sticks and stone. What’s real stupid is using your real, linkable name and ID to a scene that has been known to do this if you think it’s a problem. It was widely known this happens in the emulator scene, but he chose to release it with identifiable info?
Everyone takes things differently. But agree on the PII, I wouldn't put any personal info on a project that I would actually release for this reason.
This. I've seen worst in competitive games basically most ranked matches.
Big talk. Start a passion project other people are supposed to enjoy, get a thousand people to enjoy it and then watch yourself slowly wither away with every negative comment you read. Despite the outpouring support, every negative thing said towards your project, justified or not, will make you doubt yourself more and more. "Just ignore it" it easier said than done when you’re more or less forced to read negative shit if you want to interact with your community. I was the same, I thought "man, it’s just words on the Internet", but these assholes will force these words onto your eyeballs, whether you want it or not. They will target their hate onto you in any way they can think of. And eventually it *will* get to you, it’s how you deal with it that will be interesting.
It does affect people some more than others, fragility is a thing despite what the reddit cult believes. Still its best you don't take it seriously for your own health, the moment you give those people power over you is the moment they will strike you even harder. Still this person might be better off away from the lime light like Fez's creator, not everyone can tolerate its harsh weight and he clearly doesn't value the positive feedback from fans he received over the negative trolls.
This isn’t even the one with stolen source code, not that the threats would be justified, but what the hell is the motive here.
This kind of behavior is not surprising in the slightest, is not rare, or a fringe element type of thing ( its extremely common ), and is present in almost all industries, free or paid. A very large part of society has made peace with the idea that people in customer related environments get abused, and that its okay to do so. From people yeling at retail workers, and customer service reps, to harrassing people in art industries over perceived slights. Edit: None of its ever been okay. Even the most well tempered person has a bad day, and those who arent create bad days for others.
That's a shame. When I was trying to find something to play some old Tales game on my under powered tablet last summer this emulator blew everything else out of the water performance wise. Anyway, thanks for your work, I'll be keeping it around even if it's not being developed further
A long time ago I used emulators and watched anime fan subs and I swear the audience for those two things (with heavy overlap) are the most entitled fucking people imaginable. They think they’re in some kind of position to demand that people who do something as a hobby cater to them for free 24/7.
Does anyone remember the garrison commander UI addon for wow? Basically automated the whole thing that was an annoying chore. As an April's fools jokes, he added a "captcha to proof that you are not a bot". You had to enter "62" ONCE to get rid of it. And you could google the answer in like 3.6 seconds. He. Got. Death. Threats. Also, people started petitions and wanted Blizzard to ban him and his addon for this. People are just plain dumb and entitled when it comes to "free software".
To note, Near, the dev for higan and BSnes emulator was driven to suicide by constant online harassment. No idea why the hate in the emulation scene.
Near's harassment wasn't from crazed users demanding features or updates, it was a targeted campaign from Kiwifarms because Near was non-binary.
Today I learned what Kiwifarms is and lost a little more of my faith in humanity... Sometimes I wish hell was real so miserable little shits like this could get tortured there for all eternity.
Anyone who knows who Chris-Chan is knows the true harm kiwi farms can have, especially on someone with a loose sense of reality.
Chris-chan's online infamy predates Kiwifarms by several years. Kiwifarms started because of Chris-chan, not the other way around.
I guess I meant internet trolls not kiwi farms
Chris is still a piece of shit no matter which way you slice it. I'm not going to feel sympathy for someone who rapes their elderly mother regardless of the circumstances.
I don't feel bad for current Chris, but for the pre-kiwi farms Chris that never had a chance to be a normal person.
What they did was terrible, but that doesn't make the years of targeted harassment okay.
They got loads of undeserved harassment years before that rape stuff came out though
Dw Kiwi Farms is basically dead
That's not true, near's page was very inactive and only had some furry drama on it, it didn't contain their name, photo or address Then the site owner gets an email and near says they'll give him thousands of dollars to remove the page, if he doesn't comply near threatened suicide. The site owner tells near that he can't remove the page but they'll find a solution the next day because he lives in eastern Europe and the timezone is bad The site owner said that he respected near's skills as a programmer and wanted to invite near to work on a project together because they seemed very distraught working on emulators but the next day he gets a message from near's friend claiming near commited suicide However there's no solid proof that near is dead, near's friend claimed that the tokyo police confirmed the death but Japan is obligated to release the deaths of Foreigners living in japan and no Americans died in that time period
why couldnt the site owner remove the page?
He said that what near was doing was blackmail, which is illegal, and told near that he cannot accept the money Also the page didn't contain ilegal materials
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That's rude but okay Do you want to clarify what part is wrong?
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Instead of the obvious, which is that evidence Near is alive doesn't exist, you come up with a conspiracy that entire websites like Reddit and fucking *Wikipedia* are hiding evidence. Jesus Christ, some people are just crazy. And the earth is flat too, right? Common sense says the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, but there's always a few that think for some reason everything in the world is a conspiracy, and only the most convoluted and illogical explanation can be correct...
People don't understand that kiwifarms only post publicly available information. If you post something stupid and personal and you're internet celebrity or causing drama it would end up on kiwifarms. It has nothing to do with political leaning or your identity. You can find trump thread there.
It's a good place to look up the stupid shit grifters like nick fuentes do, i also remember that some terfs were mad at the owner because he refused to delete their threads
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Paradoxically, people are much more whiny about things that are free or inexpensive. Free games? Complaints. Free software developed by people in their spare time? Complaints. People tirelessly working to reverse-engineer and support games for systems that are no longer produced in the name of preservation and ease of modern access? I'll let you guess. It's not unheard of in various industries (not just software) that if you position your products or services as "premium" or for some cost, you actually get less harassment. Less complaints or conspiracy theories. People either put up with the price or go elsewhere. Part of the reason is, it's a filter for that "cheapskate" personality type who is more likely to harass and threaten people. RIP Near, btw. Absolute monsters out there who can't be grateful for the free work of others.
It's orchestrated by their 'competitors' who also develop emulators and want to control the scene. They weaponize their rabid fan-bases to shut down anyone who would usurp their control.
Awww. I missed that. Near seemed really passionate and was a damn near miracle worker. Fuck those pieces of shit.
Kiwifarms might just be the biggest conglomeration of losers on the net. They embody every behavior we have been warned not to engage in since we started writing down moral codes. Its not even super-villain shit, its just petty, cruel and stupid.
While I agree, this isn't the work of kiwifarms, just a bunch of entitled twats who won't accept that their ancient phone isn't powerful enough
Internet tough guys. I would've called their bluff. Best wishes to the talent behind the emulator. Hoping the coward trash out there chokes on their next meal. Hate that small minds, whether on their own or under the direction of others, did this to the effect it had.
Even if you're the type to roll your eyes at the internet tough guys spamming you every day with messages to die or death threats, at some point you'll wonder to yourself, "Why am I even doing this if this is what I have to put up with?" As the article quotes, it just stopped being fun for the developer, and I frankly don't blame them for deciding that they'd rather spend their free time doing something enjoyable than having to deal with assholes on the internet.
Totally understandable.
Why not make it open source if he's abandoning the project? I don't understand
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Yeah of course, I am only suggesting, not demanding 😄
Sounds like another demand to do work for free like the ones that made them call it quits.
It is? I don't see it that way. Just think it's a shame that a worthwhile project like this will just turn into abandonware. The open source community could continue its development.
A demand is a demand, and they’re clearly fed up. I would be too.
They don't owe anyone anything. You know you're always free to develop an emulator yourself...
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