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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Is that really specific to IRC? I'm sure there's at least as much drama on Discord or large Whatsapp/telegram groups today.

Any community with sub-groups and a privilege system for ops/voice/... will generate drama.

It's not a fatality either, I've been on many smaller channels that were focusing on a specific topic and mostly used for technical discussions and the only moderator interventions were to kick spammers or update the /topic.

It saddens me a bit that IRC is so unpopular with newer generations, now the discussion has moved to proprietary, centralized solutions like Discord. Yet another nail in the free, distributed, decentralized, non-ad-driven, non-HTTP-based internet coffin.

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> Is that really specific to IRC? I'm sure there's at least as much drama on Discord or large Whatsapp/telegram groups today.

The fact that anyone can start their own group limits tin god syndrome on those networks. IRC requires moderate technical skill and either running or paying for servers, which is enough of a hurdle that admins can get away with quite a lot of bad behaviour before being ousted.

Yes. Communication software that can be set up by anyone with some technical skill is bad. Communication software run by centralized corporations is good. No drama possible when your entire chat system can be nuked with a press of a button from some anonymous "moderator".

It's more that ease of setting up a new community makes the network effect nearly negligible which mitigates a large amount of the personnel issues that usually crop up when it takes more capital to get something going. It's really got very little to do with the centralization or corporation backing it directly.

We'll see about that whenever Discord wants to cleanup their act for a buyout/IPO/advertiser/whatever and they start banning things that are not corporate-friendly.

Many internet users sure love complaining about "muh free speech" post-facto when they're more than happy to buy into closed ecosystems in the first place.

This is not aimed at you personally by the way, I'm just always frustrated to see this pattern repeating itself year after year and yet users keep hoping to new proprietary platforms. "No but we swear it's different this time you guys!!".

Well, there really isn't, because the moderators are so far away from the day-to-day conflicts. Rather like how living under a distant emperor and his unaccountable mandarins tends to mean less day-to-day drama than living in the wild west, where it's easy to attract the attention of the local big man.

You missed the point completely. The issue is that it requires tech skills instead of being accessible to everyone, so those techies can, as you say "nuke" people.

I don't think ISPs care at all about this. They care about the health of their networks.

That's for network-level drama, sure, but in my experience most of the day-to-day drama was at the channel level and anybody can start a new channel.

And back in its heydays there were enough big IRC networks that you could just hop from one to the other if the admins became a nuisance. Then you had an eggdrop bot synchronize both channels during the migration, good times.

Unfortunately, it's hard to compete with 'free as in beer'. Especially when Discord offers an unbeatable platform for free by burning VC money.

> Is that really specific to IRC? I'm sure there's at least as much drama on Discord or large Whatsapp/telegram groups today.

Well yeah but with IRC you used to be able to perform hostile takeovers by knocking people offline strategically.

You can't really do that with Discord so the drama tends to stay as an argument rather than a DDoS battle

Matrix might be the great hope for decentralised comms.

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