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Comment by vr46 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed - This article is wrong at the beginning, Chatham House Rules are not a gag, they allow everyone to talk FREELY. I have been to many classes and forums under this rule, not least at Chatham House in St James Square, and it means that the speakers can speak freely, name names, without hedging or fudging or perambulating around the shrubbery. You can report whatever you like, but not who said it. I have heard so many truths in these discussions that were 15 years before their time - the behaviour of Mohammed Al-Fayed, for example - which carry much more weight when you hear them from an eyewitness, even if they do not wish to be named.

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I like how the parent points out that it was a similar rule and not explicitly stated as "Chatham House Rules".

>This is not new. Many of the mailing lists that dominated the discourse of the early Internet in the 1990s operated under a similar rule. The novelty is that it disappeared almost entirely for decades.

Anecdotally, I believe this rule was followed implicitly and often subconsciously and probably through some of the peak blogosphere era, despite blogs being accessible by the general public at the time. People were still looking for their tribe to escape the intellectual, creative, or censored dullness of their local surroundings.

The concept of ratting out people who were looking for the same thing would not occur to most people. They prized the discussion they couldn't have elsewhere more than the specific points being made. It'd be like the pilgrims going back to England and complaining to the English about all the other crazy heretics in the new world.

The whole thing started disapearing when going "viral" on social media started becoming a thing.

> Agreed - This article is wrong at the beginning, Chatham House Rules are not a gag

FYI gag as in "gag order" not gag as in a joke.

In case anyone else was confused about this as I was :)

I didn't mean gag as joke, it was a direct reference to the article, but I see that people might be confused.

Yeah, I wasn't criticizing or anything, that's why I wrote it as clarification. I assumed other people like me might read your comment without having read the article.

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