Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Why HEXUS and Other Forums Are Closing

  • Operators say the Online Safety Act (OSA) creates large compliance overhead: reading hundreds of pages of Ofcom guidance, doing “illegal content” and children’s risk assessments, maintaining complaints processes, naming a compliance contact, and potentially adding age verification.
  • For HEXUS specifically, the company is dissolved, the forum was already in sunset / read‑only mode, and there’s “no one left” to do the work, so deletion is seen as the only realistic option.
  • Some argue the forum was effectively dead anyway (very low recent activity), and the OSA is more a final push or a protest framing than the root cause.

How Broad Is the Law? Disagreement Over Scope and Cost

  • One camp: the law is so vague and sweeping that any user‑generated content (UGC) site “that might hypothetically be used by someone in the UK” faces excessive, open‑ended risk and workload. Terms like “reasonable” and “proportionate” plus “foreign interference” and 17 categories of “illegal harms” are seen as weapons for selective enforcement.
  • Other camp: Ofcom’s own guidance says small services with low risk mainly need what any serious forum already has—terms of service, a report/complaints tool, moderation that acts on illegal content once aware, and a named contact. Age checks apply mainly to porn. They see panic and misreading more than genuine burden.
  • Several note that “large” services (7M+ monthly UK users) have far stricter duties; for small sites, proactive detection/AI filtering is not required.

Jurisdiction, Geo‑blocking, and Personal Risk

  • Non‑UK operators discuss geoblocking the UK (including projects like lobste.rs); Ofcom has reportedly confirmed this is a valid compliance path.
  • For UK‑based sites, geoblocking doesn’t help, and there’s extra fear over personal liability for a named “senior manager” and the possibility (however small) of cross‑border enforcement or extradition.
  • Some suggest incorporation or selling the forum abroad; others respond that the corporate veil can be pierced, and personal liability clauses undermine this.

Archiving vs Deletion

  • Many lament deletion of 2.6M historic posts; liken it to “burning down a library.”
  • Counter‑view: OSA doesn’t target historic content per se; risk for a read‑only archive is probably minimal, so full deletion is unnecessary and more a form of protest or over‑cautiousness.
  • Proposals include: making it read‑only, anonymizing users, donating to Internet Archive / Archive Team, or hosting under a non‑UK entity.

Broader Free‑Speech vs Safety Debate

  • Long subthreads argue whether “online hate” and radicalization justify such regulation:
    • Critics see moral panic, regulatory capture favoring big platforms, and a slippery slope toward censorship of controversial but legitimate discussion (drugs, sex work, religion, geopolitics).
    • Supporters accept that some limits on speech and platform duties are needed to address bullying, CSAM, incitement, and coordinated disinformation, though many still find the OSA poorly drafted and communication from Ofcom confusing.
  • Several commenters frame this as the end of the “old”, hobbyist‑friendly web and a shift toward heavily regulated, centralized platforms.