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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand how switching to a different system is going to do anything about levels of abuse and harassment.

I'm sure it will be easier to use, at least. IRCv3 was trying to solve some of this but I haven't heard a peep in years.

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Spam can be difficult to stop on IRC compared to modern webchat applications. From lacking things like javascript, captchas, cdns, and so on, to having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users.

> From lacking things like javascript, captchas, cdns, and so on

In what way are any of these technologies relevant for a chat platform?

> having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users

You have exactly as many ways to verify users as are implemented in your NickServ, and pretty much every snazzy web-y proprietary chat platform has a "distributed network architecture" as well.

IRC has plenty of real problems, but your particular list of arguments seems completely irrelevant.

NickServ is not typically required for IRC usage.

If your network is large enough to have spam and identity issues, you have nickserv.

NickServ is not part of IRC. It's just a bot that people wrote to overcome one of the key shortcomings of IRC, and is used at the discretion of individual server administrators. IRC itself has literally no way to verify users, and more importantly no _opinion_ on how you should verify them.

Sure, people have written bots/services that have become part of some server packages' standing offering (chanserv, nickserv, opserv, etc.) but there's no spec for them, every server's implemention has (sometimes wildly) different command sets, and as effectively text-scroll CLI, they don't actually make things all that much easier. They're a chore to use. And I say that as an IRCop.

IRC as a platform is insufficient in today's world, so if you're going to spend a lot of time either finding -- or more likely, making -- services to take care of all the administrative tasks that IRC itself does not cover, you might as well just go one step further and go "you know what? IRC isn't sacred, if we're spending time and money on trying to make it usable in 2019, then how we instead spend that same time and money on finding a good solution to the problem we're having, rather than sticking with IRC for no good reason".

....JavaScript?

The post says the new system will enforce authentication, and hints at dealing with bots and spam accounts. But it’s not going to be easy without inconveniencing users to some extent (or a greater extent than now).

IRC could enforce authentication without much effort. You could use email registration, etc.

Maybe there's some black magic in other services to do better anti-bot/spam than that?

Generally speaking, systems that add registration onto irc tend to make it even harder to use than it already is. In order to make it better you basically have to make it at best act strangely with existing clients, or at worst make it completely incompatible with them.

You sound like you have absolutely no idea. You are greeted by NickServ on connecting with an unregistered nick, asking you to register with your email by sending a standard /msg. You open the email and click the link. I remember doing this for FreeNode at the age of 13. It’s fine.

Then you close your laptop and reopen it and you have to reconnect. Oh, you want it to automatically reconnect? No problem, you can automate identifying yourself to NickServ with a simple command like /NETWORK ADD -autosendcmd "/^msg nickserv ident pass;wait 2000" ExampleNet

Oh, a ghost session stopped you connecting as YourName and now you're YourName2 ? No problem, NickServ can kill your ghost session so you can get your registered nick back. Oh, you want to do that automatically? No problem, just download this script - a mere 10 lines of perl - and put it into your irssi autorun directory.

Easy, as you say. Anyone who disagrees has absolutely no idea :)

Bullshit objections. I cannot remember the last time I had a ghost session that I needed to have killed. NickServ password integration comes by default even in Emacs’s ERC.

What’s so complicated about this again? https://i.k8r.eu/Jr-NBg.png

I've been on irc of various flavors for 25 years now. I've seen every problem nickserv system can manifest and I've seen it cause a lot of problems for users less technical than me.

It's nice that you've never had a problem with it. Doesn't mean it's easy or perfect or that no one does.

The typical ways to combat spam are also the ones most toxic for privacy and anonymity. On discord, the chat service that Rust migrates from IRC, I had to enter captchas quite often in order to log in to my existing account. Simply because I cleared all my cookies and had a different IP address. I rather have the little amounts of IRC spam than having to give them my phone number (EDIT: I've heard from someone who logged in to discord using a VPN who now has to enter one even on logins outside of VPNs). Abandoning IRC seems to be against Mozilla values.

> I don't really understand how switching to a different system is going to do anything about levels of abuse and harassment.

It’s just another failed attempt at trying to find a technical solution to a social problem.

Do you have any social solutions to the “social problem”?

The standard solution? Culturing people?

Technical solutions are placebos at best.

The solution to a social problem can be social in nature.

If you apply this to the OP blog post you can see that the desire to get away from IRC to "safer" products comes from the desire to deal with the social problem in a social way, but in a hidden way:

The technical solution will supposedely make it easier to apply the social solutions, i.e. the barrier of entry for undesired participants will be higher.

An undesired participant can be someone who questions Mozilla on a fundamental level (i.e. on the topic of meritocracy, privacy, inclusion, activism, etc.)

The proposed solution is reverting to a "safe space", i.e. something that promises to automatically protect against undesired participants, because Mozilla has long ago decided that it does not tolerate being questioned on a fundamental level.

This ultimately results in a reclusive filter bubble, where a significant part of the audience is no longer allowed to exist.

Since Mozilla does not seem to want to invest in moderating these spaces in a democratic and open way, which is very costly (but human relationships are always costly), the proposed solution is to build a fence between "us" und "them".

It can put registration and private messages, etc, under their control.

They they can raise their anti-spam bar arbitrarily high to block alt registrations and enforce bans. Sight of all PMs could be used for anti-harrassment too, but don't know if they'd do that.

Accessibility, especially from bandwidth efficient light weight software or text only devices is at odds with blocking automated spam.

If you make it much harder for anyone with unusual software to connect, you make it harder for spam (and also a lot more legitimate users than spammers, but those don't count because they don't cause issues for operators).

Registration solves this rather well. Especially when paired with requiring an email account to get a registration password.

At the expense of making it even more complicated for users -- especially inexperienced users, or users on mobile devices -- to access the chat.

Realising that I am at a point where I don't reflect the majority of their user base, how did we get to the point that registering via anything that's not a fancy web interface is considered too hard for inexperienced users?

I'm relatively certain that wasn't considered a problem back when I got into IRC and there were more active networks and channels out there. You for whatever reason logged on and were often greeted by messages or even a bot that helped through the sign-up process. Even most GUI clients contained relatively straightforward ways to automate the authentication steps afterwards as well. Again realizing that I'm now in the "snarky old grump" position, discord and slack often feel like a step in the wrong direction. On the one hand it's nice that these platforms include rich media, message archiving/replay, and technically inept users (although the latter would have worked fine with bouncers/webapps back in the day), on the other hand it's just moving my personal communication to yet another corporate silo with weird monetisation.

Not trying to imply that IRC would represent something more convenient messaging wise but did we really have to move in the completely different direction there just to integrate a few solutions and add monetisation?

How Long has it been since an inexperienced user found their way onto IRC?

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