Ask HN: What are the IRC servers that are available as onion service only | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the IRC servers that are available as onion service only

13 pointsfocus202010 comments

Hello HN, I am looking for online communities for open and intelligent discourse on non-tech(politics, culture,e.t.c) and tech topics. My hypothesis is if entry barrier is low, high moderation is required to maintain quality posts like HN, conversely if the entry barrier is high it acts as a moderation on the users quality. One of the things i miss in HN is the controversial opinions from intelligent people.

Few days ago there was this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21691802 which had many public(non onion service) irc servers listed but I am looking for irc servers that is only available as onion service which has the right property for high barrier entry (setup) and provide anonymity for open conversation.

View on HN

onion only

intelligent discourse on non-tech(politics, culture,e.t.c)

In my opinion, you mentioned two things that are not compatible, even with the most vigilant moderation. The moderation, filters and access controls required to prevent chaos would simply drive people away. You might find a small handful of regulars that behave, but I think you would mostly hear crickets chirping.

I like the idea though. I wish such a thing could work. You could always try it as an experiment. Set up an IRCD and Services, maybe LDAP backend so you can also tie it to a website and expose it on the Tor network. As part of the experiment, perhaps you could share on HN how many people created accounts, what the account churn rate is like and how many people had to be banned per day vs. people offering intelligent discourse.

I can confidently state that the public onion IRCs are not what you want. The people looking for quality chats have been driven away by the crazies.

I was about to say that onion only IRC channels aren't for high quality discussion. They're for discussion by people who are paranoid for one reason or another. People selling drugs/credit card numbers/weapons. People with extreme political ideology who are talking about violent revolution. People who mentally unstable with paranoia.

A better site for someone wanting high level discussion on a narrowly focused topic is Reddit, although you will have to choose your subreddits carefully. It can be a difficult needle to thread, but there are quite a large number of quality subreddits once you know how to search.

I don't have any of those intentions but I have to think twice before posting and make sure it's politically correct. I assume this other people might feel the same.

Can you provide any examples of high quality subreddits?

It depends on your interests, but for HN readers /r/networking is a pretty good place for enterprise networking discussion. /r/rust has some helpful people in it if you're working with the Rust programming language. /r/science has extremely strict moderation that makes it a good read-only subreddit unless you are an actual scientist who can back up their post.

Generally you want a subreddit with a small but active userbase. Not too small or it tends to die off, but also not too big or the S/N ratio drops off.

>People selling drugs/credit card numbers/weapons

I don’t think this really happens on Tor IRCs, at least not at any significant scale.

>People who mentally unstable with paranoia.

It’s mostly this, and pedophiles

Maybe by asking here, you yourself don't meet the barrier of entry.

I did find several servers via google on the first page.

suggestion from HN user has more weight than Google search since Google search is based on popularity and not quality.

It would’ve been great to have a “Political/controversial HN”, as a separate section of the site like Ask and Show. Obviously with the HN guidelines, and where the posts and moderation have the same high quality.

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