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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I'm always amazed at the amount of drama in communities like this, given that the absolute value of these channels tends to be so low.

I mean, we're not talking about someone hijacking an ad-rich youtube channel here. This is the "##hntop" channel. It reposts top news from... this very site. It's something anyone reading this comment can get for free by pressing the back button on their browser.

And yet someone still decides it's worth their effort to kick an admin (or I guess in this case force the channel registration) and steal it? Good grief.

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I feel the same way, but I think it's really simple: people who care enough about being mods to become one are the same people who are likely to let it get to their head.

Mod drama on reddit for instance is fairly incredible in scope and dedication. For some people being a mod seems to be effectively a full time activity and getting to mod as many subreddits as possible an objective, regardless of whether you have any particular interest in the sub in question. It's absolutely baffling to me because you'd have to pay me to do that job, but clearly some people thrive on this type of power.

Not just someone, the "owner" of the network.

In my opinion, this is a graver offense than, say, someone using an exploit or similar to take over a channel. This person is supposed to be in a position of power and trust.

Often lowest stakes and highest drama go hand-in-hand.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

Pretty much makes it even worse.

This is why expecting names (nicks and channels) on IRC to have any permanent meaning causes problems. The protocol was not designed for this (and I question weather it can be done in any reasonable way without a "benevolent dictator" kind of authority.)

DNS has the same problem amusingly.

I had the same thought I think it’s super funny I’m reading about IRC drama on here in 2021

I don’t know anything about IRC, but it seems more benign that that: the person who ran ##hntop abandoned it for another platform, so the guy who runs its sister channel, ##hnnew, recreated it, because they naturally go together. Calling this “abuse” seems like a stretch to me.

Suppressing news of a channel trying to move elsewhere, by administratively taking over the registration and then removing the notice from the topic, is pretty scummy.

He could've easily just joined his bot to the channel to keep the news going, fine. But removing OP's note about moving elsewhere is what rubs me the wrong way about this.

You can register channels, the point of which is exactly that this sort of thing cannot happen, or at least not trivially.

Of course, when you run the network, you can do what you want. But then, that's the point of the move.

Yes, I can see that it’s a technical violation of the policy. On the other hand, OP explicitly abandoned the channel and then cried “abuse” when the administrator stepped in to resuscitate it. And now this very tiny tempest in a teapot is at the top of HN for us all to gawk at.

the concern is more about the impersonation.

It's like you had mysite.com, decided to rename it to a new domain and so put a redirect. And then the CEO of the DNS authority decided to take your domain for himself, put a copy of your previous site on it and pretended that you never moved it in the first place.

It’s nothing like that. If you want a modern analogy, it’s like the moderators of a subreddit abandoning it, and the reddit admins deciding to keep it going anyway. It violates the expected wall between moderators and admins, but it’s hardly theft or impersonation.

But the reddit admins never take away channels like this. For an abandoned subreddit to be took away, it needs _time_. Just like on freenode (where the registration would eventually expire with the expiration of OP's nick). There, rasengan abused his services power to alter the registration without any respect of freenode' policies.

And he's justifying this as "spamming". Because OP's said in the topic of HIS channel that the channel moved to libera.

It's not "abuse" as in "this guy is abusive to other people", sure. It does look like an administrative action that goes against community norms. If the authorization used for this action had been derived from community trust, it would be fair to call it abuse of the latter. In this case of course it's just another sad footnote in a sad state of affairs.

freenode has a traditional policy for ##-namespaced channels to require a period of inactivity before they may be re-registered. Lee ignored this.

I understood it as: the channel was not dropped and recreated anew, but straight taken over.

this is semantics, overall. But the channel was dropped by rasengan, as chanserv channel creation timestamp implies. Taken over in chanserv ACLs or dropped+recreated is kinda the same thing tho, a straight take over.

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