Hacker News Reader

Comment by roflc0ptic | Hacker News Reader

The behavior, as I understand it, is that Lee and company behaved mendaciously, taking what was a community/volunteer "staff" run enterprise and legalistically maneuvering to turn it into his own fiefdom without consent or even a modicum of transparency.

Maybe this will have no operational effect, but it registers as terrifically unethical and destructive - he's predictably alienated and driven off most of the people running freenode. When people behave unethically and destructively in one scenario, it's easy to expect them to behave unethically and destructively in other scenarios. It's unacceptable from a governance perspective.

Moving away from freenode is simple risk mitigation.

View on HN

Fiefdom is especially funny when you know Lee was crowned king of Korea a couple of years ago:

* https://nextshark.com/korea-crown-prince-andrew-lee/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lee_(entrepreneur)

That is hilarious. Thanks.

Fiefdom? What do you mean?

I'm no native speaker nor have I ever heard that word before. Looking online I found this definition:

fiefdom /ˈfiːfdəm/

a territory or sphere of operation controlled by a particular person or group.

"a mafia boss who has turned the town into his private fiefdom"

A fiefdom is the domain of a feudal lord. Like "kingdom" but where the lord could be a duke, earl, baron, ...

Historically, lords had nearly absolute legal authority over the peasants living in their domain.

'fiefdom' in English with the slightly redundant -dom suffix, simply 'fief' in French (a term commonly used), and closer to the root, 'feudo' in Italian and Spanish.

Yes, what the other commenters said. By exerting unilateral control, he's destroying the existing democratic governance mechanisms and making it a sort of rule by dictatorship. If you metaphorically treat freenode as territory, you can say that it's become Lee's fief, or fiefdom.

It’s when a manager or leader thinks they are the king or God of their little organization, and typically run it like a despotic ruler

The term 'fief' comes from Medieval land tenure, where it's land granted to a lord in exchange for feudal service. Pop medievalism holds that feudal lords had pretty unlimited rights (the reality is that it's far more complex), and so the term 'fiefdom' in modern contexts carries a connotation that the ruler of the fiefdom is ruling it tyrannically. Another element of the modern connotation is that a fiefdom is usually small, and the ruler is acting as if it's rather more important than it actually is.

In short, it's a backhanded insult.

> Another element of the modern connotation is that a fiefdom is usually small, and the ruler is acting as if it's rather more important than it actually is.

> In short, it's a backhanded insult.

[citation needed]

Not sure where you could get citations for general cultural references like this. For what it's worth, his description of it being an insult is exactly how I understand it to be used too. Someone who thinks they are more powerful or important than they really are. Native English speaker here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com