I'm only a sample of 1 but on IRC I never felt surrounded by trigger happy mods. on discord I got regularly kicked without notice for some not even heated argument.
if I extrapolate, this side of the web is becoming a way for people to craft tiny bubbles to fit their own little views on life.
Discord servers filled with former/current IRC users rarely have any issues in my experience.
[1] topics could be from science, to collapse, to dev ..
I think for better or worse old days IRC was more of a locker room, while most Discords are wide audience places, more of the restaurants kind.
You still have a galaxy of locker room types of community, I see no real need to try to carve that out of every service.
In such places speech is a privilege and not a right.
The only remarkable thing here in this article is the size of the discord. The problem with huge size is that the amplification effect is a lot bigger and that tends to get noticed. In the real world you don’t have bars with tens of thousands of guests.
The last line you mention is true-ish if said rather derogatory, but if you value freedom of speech, you can also extrapolate that everyone has a right on their view of life, nothing little about it.
The problem that is not being mentioned is cause and effect. If your view on life is basically violent and emotional, that helps nothing when it comes to public discourse. In all my years when I was a mod on IRC, never did name calling or derogatory names further an argument or improve communication, except when we were maybe discussing the topic itself.
Maybe I didn't see the sign 'no complaints about tea temperature allowed in here or you will be removed asap' but I found the whole ordeal ridiculously immature.
What I am looking forward though is a good in-depth review of what happened, preferably from a neutral party. Because there seem to be politics involved as well (as in wall street influencing)
The target audience for Discord is kids, of course they're going to have harsher moderation policies than IRC did back in the day.
In essence, Discord's staff enforces a hidden layer of moderation behind the scenes. They contact server owners in private and point out individual members' faults and list exact words that are to be removed. In this way, server admins are encouraged to overmoderate due to the obvious imbalance (risk of losing an entire server vs losing a few users), yet they have to take flak from individual users.
I've seen server moderators removing completely legit messages afterwards and they've openly admitted that they can't risk someone perusing the chat history for ToS breaches, screenshotting individual lines of text and sending them to Discord abuse team, because Discord does not care about context, only actual words (see their anti-reclamation policy - even black hip-hop artists have been deplatformed for using the well known mother of all bad words in a positive context).
This only applies to partnered and/or verified guilds. All other guilds are only checked on user complaints and otherwise unmoderated (bar the explicit content filter, that applies at the gateway level, before the event gets propagated) by Discord staff.
On a hundred of IRC channels (which had mods) over many years I had like 3 such interactions (and I have to flex to remember). On discord it was 50% in a month.
discord make people very very attached to their virtual space. They craft it, install emojis, makes per room rules, lots of decisions .. it changes how you connect with others, very defensive by nature.