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This is why we can't have nice things. IRC is a constant drama, all the way back to The Great Split[0] Been involved with IRC a good 25 years, running a prett
by moepstar 5y ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
IRC is a constant drama, all the way back to The Great Split[0]
Been involved with IRC a good 25 years, running a pretty popular blog about it "back in the days", i just couldn't be bothered keeping it up and updated because of all the constant fighting, arguing, bickering and people outright attacking each other all the damn time.
I'm not entirely sure what it is, but something about IRC gives people big egos, omnipotence fantasies which, again, leads to drama - i, myself, just concluded it wasn't worth my time anymore and moved on.
Mind you, this comes from someone who met his (former) wife on IRC, made great friendships with people all over the world - something i'm still grateful for to this very day.
But it wasn't made to last, sadly.
[0] http://www.irc.org/history_docs/TheGreatSplit.html http://www.irc.org/history_docs/TheGreatSplit.html
- speeder 5y agoIrc is banned on Brazillian servers, most ISPs will insta-cancel your contract if they detect you are running a IRC server. Reason for that is that Irc drama attracts brazillian hackers and script kiddies like flies, having an irc server is like having a huge DDoS magnet, having a irc server is an excellent way to make a whole ISP crumble under attack. Last major irc network we had went bankrupt because of their DDoS protection costs rising and rising and rising until they went in debt to stay online and until they couldn't pay the debts.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoThat's really interesting. I wonder what's particular to Brazil that causes this?
- topranks 5y agoI don't think it's particular to Brazil.
- simias 5y agoI do recall that many ISPs had specific provision against running IRC servers in the ToS (IIRC OVH does/did?), although in my experience it wasn't actively enforced unless you started causing trouble. Ditto for bittorent.
- speeder 5y agoBrazil is particular in that and other related things. For example many MMORPGs have Brazil-only servers, because brazillians tend to hack, cheat and troll, so many games have ip-banned the entire Brazil range and then made a server just for Brazillians. When website defacing was all the rage, Brazil had the dubious hanking of having the most defacing groups and the most defaced sites, despite internet in Brazil being much smaller than US or EU. According to Kapersky last year, Brazil is first place in cibercrime ranking in South America, and third in the worldwide ranking. Brazil is also currently fourth place worldwide in the number of bot farms.
- ingenieroariel 5y agoand number one in weirdo NFT marketplaces like Hic et Nunc
- the42thdoctor 5y agoHU3 HU3 HU3 BR
- villasv 5y agoI wouldn't say it's particular to Brazil but I can try to guess the biggest contributing factors. Brazil is huge (so lots of script kiddies) but it has only like 3 major ISPs (attending big cities). Also ISPs here have a lot of leeway on QoS matters, even after net neutrality laws.
- giardini 5y ago" ISPs here have a lot of leeway" Ha, ha saw what you did there! So, apparently for freenode staff it's either "Lee's way or the hiway"?
- tinus_hn 5y agoNothing, this happened in Europe as well. IRC attracts this because of how the model works (although it has long since been mitigated through chanserv etc), if no one is in a channel and you enter it you are the owner. So if you can boot everyone else off of the network you can take over the channel.
- marcodiego 5y agoI'm a brazilian and I watched it. There were two major IRC networks in Brazil. The older and bigger with more users was Brasnet, the younger, smaller and with less proficient users was brasirc later renamed to redebrasil. IRC in Brazil was mostly born on university campi but, by the second half of the 90's it quickly attracted teens who simply wanted to chat. Our version of the Eternal September. Most used OS at the time was win9x and most used IRC client was mIRC. Actually, most users didn't know the difference between mIRC and IRC. So, it was very very unsafe for illiterate users. Self-reproducing mIRC scripts and people trying to fool others with netbus and the like was extremely common. One day, by the end of the 90's, both major networks joined. The service quality went deeply down. Operators of big channels lost their status, illiterate users flooded the network and traditional brasnet channels got filled with users from redebreasil who weren't used to the established netiquette. To make things worse, redebrasil had advertisements and such ads went together with them when they joined brasnet. That day was one of the saddest days of my life, that day I lost my operator status on #programacao on brasnet, I was 15 and getting that status was no easy task. It was the day I stopped using IRC in Brazil. The thing just went downhill from there. Getting IRCop status was reason to act arrogantly, attacks were rampant and winxp came along been not much safer than win9x. Netsplit was common because of the attacks, bots tryied to fool people to shady and phishing sites, there was no control to stop abuse from IRCops... Then, by the beginning of the 2000's IM became more popular, then social networks. Actually MSN messenger and orkut popularity were major blows in brazilian IRC. New people buying computers to get connected no longer even knew about the existence of what was once a major entertainment communication medium. The quality of the service didn't improve, and users started migrating away from it. It commercially devalued, ISP's didn't want to host it and, in 2007, brasnet was closed: http://www.brasnet.org/2007/05/era-uma-vez-o-irc-brasileiro.html http://www.brasnet.org/2007/05/era-uma-vez-o-irc-brasileiro....
- alisonkisk 5y agoA combination of Brazil being one of largest countries, while also being non-English yet retaining its linguistic identity (people using the Internet in Portuguese, so they don't have get lumped in with USA communities), and a dash of loose law enforcement, makes things happen there that are noticeably not the generic Anglo/USA Internet
- o-__-o 5y agoAfter a disagreement on IRC led to a 400mbps DDoS attack on my university (we shrugged it off, yay internet2) I decided it was time to stop using IRC. This was 20 years ago. I think I continued from a third party shell for a year or two but eventually moved on to web forums. Before I completely left I started ghosting my dns to avoid attacks but that was more effort than it was worth
- Dracophoenix 5y agoYou could access IRC via Internet2? I always thought Internet2 was limited to accessing smaller educational networks networks like Merit, JANET or CERN.
- o-__-o 5y agoAt the time of college, for me, internet2 consisted of mostly all the accredited universities who could afford it and special companies providing limited services. The blended connection we received allowed for us to absorb the entire impact because some of the attack machines were from other university computers (which is what caused the uproar and got me a slap on the wrist.. the attack was detected upstream within about 5-7min, I was impressed)
- jacquesm 5y agoNice case of victimblaming.
- kodah 5y ago> Reason for that is that Irc drama attracts brazillian hackers and script kiddies like flies, having an irc server is like having a huge DDoS magnet, having a irc server is an excellent way to make a whole ISP crumble under attack Citation needed. Most ISPs ban IRC ports due to having a large amount of customers that are members of a botnet via a virus.
- speeder 5y agoIt is not just IRC ports. Back when I wanted make my own MMO and went shopping for business ISP, I noticed one of the contracts I read even wrote a long list of all possibly IRC related stuff, they would ban you if you had: irc server seevice, irc server software irc client software, irc bots, tools to make irc bots, mirc scripts, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember (this was around 2007)
- kodah 5y agoExactly. All of these would be part of running a botnet. In the 90s and early 2000s you assuredly had to seek out hosts specifically designed for hosting IRC shells or services. Nowadays that DDOS and traffic management work better I see less of it.
- ollran 5y agoI haven’t seen even one relatively large open source project without politics involved.
- teknopaul 5y agoYou say that like politics is a bad thing. The whole point of OS is to change the balance of power into the hands of the majority. OS fans have little respect for a forceful takeover by a rich entity. This is how it should be. Do something, or vote.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoStrange how often these FOSS dramas tend to end up removing the creators of the projects and replace them with people friendly to large multination corporations that pay lip service to the "correct" political fads.
- lliamander 5y agoA lot of politics, whether you're talking electoral politics in a democratic nation or just the drama in an open source project, amounts to little more than factional signaling and the narcissism of small differences. The political modus operandi of open source, to the extent that there is one, has generally been to opt out of existing structures and try to create new ones, rather than altering or dismantling existing ones.
- bluGill 5y agoI haven’t seen even one relatively large HUMAN ORGANIZATION without politics involved. Fixed that for you.
- jaredsohn 5y agoPerhaps can say the same for organizations of animals even. I know there are politics amongst some groups; don't know enough to state if there is always politics within any group of animals or not. https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/center/articles/2012/mother-nature-network-11-04-2012.html https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/center/articles/201...
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago25 years is pretty long in IT history. I'd say it lasted. But well, everything is political nowaday, and people apparently can't get political without creating drama. See: the last basecamp outrage.
- nanna 5y agoAristotle defined man as bios politikos, a political animal, quite a long time ago...
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoYes, but if you are among mature adults, you can discuss opposite politic views without one of your friends leaving the dinner table and slamming the door. Which apparently internet people have a hard time to handle. I have parties at home with feminists and machists, cryto speculators and communists, vegan meditators and frat guys bbq body builders, atheist hedonists and muslim minimalists, yet they manage to have fun together. When I read such title I can't help but thinking "what are they, 5 years old?".
- nanna 5y agoLike the GP of this thread you might want to reread the actual post rather than skim the title. (see my other comment). Your parties sound like a blast!
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago> Your parties sound like a blast! They are, but they take a month to prepare for. > Like the GP of this thread you might want to reread the actual post rather than skim the title. (see my other comment). In retrospect, yeah.
- goodpoint 5y ago> everything is political nowaday I think you mean "polarized". And polarization is happening only in some societies, mostly in the anglosphere. In many other places society was much more polarized 50 or 60 years ago.
- scarygliders 5y agoThey should move to Matrix. Decentralised, federated, and just that wee bit more modern. I say that as an IRC user for at least 2 decades and a recent convert to Matrix.
- wayoutthere 5y agoProbably ok for most current irc use cases; but the mobile clients for Matrix suck. I’ve also had “eventual consistency” issues with the protocol. Discord is probably the closest spiritual successor to irc (the types of communities using discord are the same types of communities that used irc in the past).
- simlevesque 5y agoDiscord is a private company, IRC and Matrix are protocols.
- dragontamer 5y agoSimilarly, no one wants "email". They want gmail, or some other service that gives them email. IRC is not a home. Discord is a home. FreeNode is (was?) a home. The admin and moderation team (and the corporate structure therein) makes a difference that technical details cannot replicate.
- vbsteven 5y agoThe point is that IRC as a protocol makes it possible to join the FreeNode “home” from any compatible client on any platform. And users can modify most of these clients to their liking. Same with email or Matrix. But with Discord users are locked in to use the closed source Discord clients, or reverse engineer the discord “protocol” and risk being banned because of it.
- anticensor 5y agoRipcord (third party client) and Litecord (third party server) exist.
- nanna 5y agoNot that I disagree, but doesn't sound like that's the issue here? The issue is that there's been a hostile takeover of freenode.net so the admins have established an network on a new domain for its communities to migrate to, libera.chat.
- simias 5y agoIs that really specific to IRC? I'm sure there's at least as much drama on Discord or large Whatsapp/telegram groups today. Any community with sub-groups and a privilege system for ops/voice/... will generate drama. It's not a fatality either, I've been on many smaller channels that were focusing on a specific topic and mostly used for technical discussions and the only moderator interventions were to kick spammers or update the /topic. It saddens me a bit that IRC is so unpopular with newer generations, now the discussion has moved to proprietary, centralized solutions like Discord. Yet another nail in the free, distributed, decentralized, non-ad-driven, non-HTTP-based internet coffin.
- lmm 5y ago> Is that really specific to IRC? I'm sure there's at least as much drama on Discord or large Whatsapp/telegram groups today. The fact that anyone can start their own group limits tin god syndrome on those networks. IRC requires moderate technical skill and either running or paying for servers, which is enough of a hurdle that admins can get away with quite a lot of bad behaviour before being ousted.
- colllectorof 5y agoYes. Communication software that can be set up by anyone with some technical skill is bad. Communication software run by centralized corporations is good. No drama possible when your entire chat system can be nuked with a press of a button from some anonymous "moderator".
- simcop2387 5y agoIt's more that ease of setting up a new community makes the network effect nearly negligible which mitigates a large amount of the personnel issues that usually crop up when it takes more capital to get something going. It's really got very little to do with the centralization or corporation backing it directly.
- simias 5y ago
- thedonkeycometh 5y agoI always say to people that say YouTube brings the worst in people that its, just, well.. people. IRC was just like that in the 90s as soon as enough people were sat in a channel it just became factional.
- izacus 5y agoHaha, how is that any different from Twitter / Silicon Valley / Slashdot / OpenSource / startup drama of the day? :) It seems the whole business, filled with young opinionated people, really invites these kind of dramas.
- dijit 5y ago> IRC is a constant drama, all the way back to The Great Split Surely this is selection bias, you don't hear about -no- drama. I run an IRC network which hasn't had any real drama for 15 years... (Current global users: 322 Max: 1514)
- ficiek 5y agoJust like this shithole of a website.