If you look in the A&H meta thread, I was the guy arguing with my fellow retards across the aisle against increased moderation of A&H for ages. Null, as far as I can remember, was pretty open about the actual reason why - that it was getting the site fucked over for "plagiarism" because Google has a crawler or whatever that searches for reposted articles on websites, that marks a site as ripping off journos and deindexes it or whatever. Which is why I tagged him, because I don't want to misrepresent that if I am in fact wrong, but I'm %99.9 positive it really was just the plagiarism thing.
The whole "those damn nazis in A&H" thing has been a misrepresentation of the people who frequent that section for ages, btw. Most regulars are conservatives/libertarians with a sprinkling of hard left and right folks.
A&H wasn't hidden because of political reasons, if that were the case Happenings and to an extent the Mass Debates sections wouldn't be public. It's the same people, for the most part.
Now that I know what A&H is, I think I can address this at least in part.
Google does not give a fuck about plagiarism. They won't ever ever ever show a Kiwifarms post as news. Newspapers who are into the Google news feed are pre accepted and reviewed, they push their articles into Google rather than wait for the crawl, because they need to be indexed faster than the regular website. Let's not even talk about being on the first page of regular news results, it would never happen.
This and a ton of other indicators, means that Google is able to detect authorship on some level when it comes to news, and they are able to detect patterns as to repeated offenders.
To add to this, if this was actually ever a real issue, he could have just blocked crawling for every thread on the board.
Imo, and I believe he might have addressed this on MATI, it's mostly that it's divise, derivative and a source of liability.
When it comes down to most cows, you don't see much arguing, or at least not the kind of vitriol that you see on polemic subjects. Fostering internal conflict does not contribute towards the good health of the site. People who actually like Kiwifarms do not want it to be right or left leaning, because it has fuck all to do with politics to begin with.
It's obviously derivative in the sense that this is not what the place is supposed to be. Obviously, it's good for engagement, and these days, we see a lot of cross overs with cowdom, but it's not something the site needs to exist.
It's a potential liability because people get very heated and end up saying stupid shit. When it's not some glow in the dark post, it's something so wrong or offensive that it end up being used against the site. This is what gets the site branded as White Nationalist, when it's anything but.
