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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem I have with IRC is its feudal social model. The first person to join a channel becomes the monarch, and can appoint deputies to impose their will on the others. There's no system for dealing with an abusive op. It's all very well to say "just start your own channel then", but that's rather like telling someone to move to Canada if they don't like the president. A channel has inertia and cannot simply be "moved", especially when the person running it can simply silence anyone who raises the idea. And there's also a single global namespace - it's not feasible to found a replacement for, say, #chat.

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These problems exist with any social network.

The IRCops of most major IRC servers are very hands off - they will not get involved in user disputes at all unless the IRC server itself is in danger.

However, you get kicked out of a Discord server or Facebook group, you're in the same situation, and Discord/Facebook isn't going to help you most of the time unless the group is violating TOS. Most IRC server's TOS are very liberal because the IRC server itself doesn't really store any data other than possibly some actual chat text - it doesn't hold images, files, etc.

> And there's also a single global namespace - it's not feasible to found a replacement for, say, #chat.

With modern IRC services you can actually create "neutral" lobby-type channels that have the services daemon as the op.

But unless you run your own chat server or social media service you'll always be at the mercy of who runs it at least a little bit.

IRC also supports anarchism with + channels that simply have no modes and no ops (also no topic which is slightly annoying) but then you are kinda at the mercy of the network admins to stop the spammers (as well as liberal use of /ignore to ignore spammers). Also some channels just give every non-spammer ops, which kinda also solves the power corrupts issue.

you can build GUIs on top of IRC that abstract away from all of this and still use the underlying protocol. I am curious what you think a better alternative would be for moderation, though. It's easy to point out flaws in all moderated systems, but it would be interesting to consider what an improvement might look like

I'm not sure what you're on about with GUIs, that doesn't seem relevant to any point I was making, but to address your other point:

You're basically asking for alternative systems of government to feudalism. This has been widely studied! Parliamentary democracy is a popular system. Imagine if chanops were chosen by election.

when would elections be held? after N number of new people join? How would you prevent rigged elections with many bots joining to represent many votes for 1 person? Other forms of governance are in wide abundance, but implementing them on top of pseudo-anonymous chatrooms is hard and could lead to mostly benefiting malicious actors.

the GUI is relevant in addressing duplicate channel names as underneath you could have UUID channels that mapped to channels named "chat" for the end user.

Sure there is, run your own network, servers and channels, have better content and attract users. You can have as many #chat channels as you want, and run them as you see fit.

Anyone can run an irc server, and it does not have to appeal or cater to everyone.

i.e. "move to Canada". That is not helpful. Even if I did set up an alternative network, it would have the same issue - a broken social model, enforced at the technical level.

That's assuming I could persuade a critical mass of people to use the new network. "Have better content"? An IRC network has no "content", it has users. Talking to other users is the point. How many IRC networks are there?

Every website has the social model you just described. You'll have to start with a decentralized protocol without server admins (the true monarchs) to get around what you're describing.

This website has dang. Slack has channel owners. Reddit has mods and admins. 4chan has janitors and admins. Flat forums had mods

IRC is the same as everything else. It's a fine thing to point out, it's just not unique to IRC in any way

> You'll have to start with a decentralized protocol without server admins

This is all or nothing thinking. We could design centralized protocols that have, for example, voting. We could design centralized protocols that call together digital juries[1].

Yes there may be powerhungry mods at the very top. They might be able to throw the votes or what not. Abuse is possible on centralized systems. But there's so vastly much we could be trying, could be doing, to alter the gerontocratic imbalance of power, even on centralized systems.

[1] http://digitaljuries.com/

Nothing's stopping you to use IRC this way, and it's trivial to add a bot to your channel with a poll feature.

The problem isn't that nobody has designed or created such a system: it's that they're not very popular.

> The problem isn't that nobody has designed or created such a system: it's that they're not very popular.

This assertion would be more interesting if there were more visible attempts. I haven't found anything on github I can deploy to moderate a channel via any kind of public-governance or other models. Can you?

Personally, I think we've done very little experimentation, and the gerontocratic rulers we dwell under generally would prefer staying in tight control. You talk about popularity, but popular for who? Even if some kind of democratic governance gained mass popularity, how many mods would be willing to hand over their long held control over channels/sites?

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