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Comment by loudtieblahblah | Hacker News Reader

is it really any different than say.. Discord?

or a subreddit?

it always stuck me as amazing in how much autonomy IRC channels tend to have on various servers, especially as the internet has changed in the past 20 years.

Between mobs wanting "accountability" for speech they don't like, the increases in liability, the MSM targeting any platform that has any free speech or autonomy to it (be it Substack, podcasts, E2EE messaging, etc.) or just blatant cash grabs by trying to control and bank off something fairly open... i thought IRC - in its near entirety - would have gone this direction a long time ago.

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No, it’s not different, but there is a difference in expectations.

If anything, Discord and Reddit are the ones that have it backwards. Their servers are theirs, and their free speech interest are theirs, but while you can own the premises and prioritize your own interests on your premises, that doesn’t grant you ownership over the communities you host.

Communities are made up of people, so claiming to own a community isn’t any different than claiming to own people. People can just pick up and move elsewhere, even if that means losing the benefits and privileges of the prior host.

There's different expectations for IRC vs most other social/chat platforms because of the structure and history. IRC has traditionally been run as a non-commercial community project so admins and server ops haven't had the same incentives for commercial palatability and IRC being older and a bit more obtuse to get into meant it didn't get the same attention in the cases where it's users do get into trouble. On top of that given it's a protocol instead of a single company there's a bit of separation where each server doesn't put pressure on all the others.

It probably would have had people continued using it in big numbers. It also helps that any major disagreement is resolved with "ok now there's 2 networks"

I was removed as the founding moderator of a subreddit. Fun times.

> Between mobs wanting "accountability" for speech they don't like

Seriously? Server and especially channel admins using their privileges to moderate the contents on their network is a decades old concept - with the debates on power abuse and the limits of "free speech" being as old.

If one thing, today's Twitter "mobs" are way more transparent than ye olde IRC fights, given that you'll have detailed explanations of the outrage under the respective hashtags.

the classic reddit debate, are Moderators Janitors or leaders...

I have always said they should be viewed as content janitors but many many many (most) moderators disagree and take the limited power they have way to seriously

Which makes them that much more apoplectic when Reddit walks in and takes their communities/powers away with no recourse.

I wonder how much annual salary they lost when Reddit takes their subreddit away.

the term "moderator" clearly suggests that they are there to moderate the conversation. otherwise they would be called "leaders."

It’s different in that it’s not what you are signing up for.

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