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The atomic element of comminication is a sender, receiver, and agreed upon medium. Everything else; identity, channel, reputation, moderation, policing, etc...

The atomic element of comminication is a sender, receiver, and agreed upon medium. Everything else; identity, channel, reputation, moderation, policing, etc...? Those are all social control mechanisms that get layered on top. IRC is fine as it was conceived in the 80's. You don't need to know the person's name. They need to be the one talked to yesterday and agreed to talk again today. At x location at Y time. This is what's been lost about Internet culture in the era of social media. We never cared who you were. We cared what you knew. What you said. What you had to share, teach, contribute or otherwise. You could be a dog, and nobody'd care. You could be RitzyBoi4778 today, and PoorJohnicusTiberiusSmirk tomorrow, but if you knew what we were talking about yesterday, you belonged just as much as anyone else. You could be an unusually tactically minded 12 year old asking insightful questions on a mailing list frequented by physicists. You could party crash a super secret gathering of the most savvy Ops on the planet just by being bored and lucky. Once you start building Gates and Walls, you've left the Net as Gateless Gate. The only obstacle being getting in, and finding your way around. Once you were in, the world was yours. I miss that era so much.

dragontamer 5y ago
But that's not in fact how IRC ever worked. IRC was still made after the first flamewars happened on Usenet. IRC is a "2nd generation" internet product in some regards. We care about identity because we want to know your posting history before we make a moderation decision. We need to know if you're here to troll, or if you're here to contribute. Its not a happy-go-lucky free world, it never was. There will be an ocean of trolls if only because bored 15-something year olds don't have anything better to do. --------- Its worse today, because we know that the troll-factor has in fact become "weaponized". Literally, through "swatting" and "doxxing", the simple use of information over the internet can become a deadly weapon in of itself. Even without swatting and doxing, there's other unsavory behaviors that should be moderated. -------- As always, one of the biggest internet debates is moderation vs unmoderation. Just like the good old days, your alt.* unmoderated Usenet groups arguing for unmoderated servers, while more "serious" usenet groups wanted more control to keep the spammers out.
- salawat 5y ago
  You're still falling into the identity trap. Speaker. Listener. Medium. Message. That's it. Anything else is a control mechanism layered on top. Moderation is not necessary to communication. Rather, it is necessary to facilitate some kinds of communication over others, and the concept of identity makes that a far easier and more effective a lever to apply to facilitated signal amplification. It all comes back to the age old question at the heart of net neutrality: dumb tubes, or marketplace of traffic valuation through optimization and classification of traffic provenance. One necessarily excludes the other. Both have rather undesirable failure states. Dumb pipes means hello spam. The other side means hello memory holing and censorship. In the end, you can survive the spam with enough patience and filtering. You can't survive malicious pruning or preemptive packet drop. The information either propagates, or it doesn't. I'd say there is greater utility overall in info propagating than not. Even for the most abhorrent types of info. You at least know of the horror out there, and that you need to investigate if the info propagates. If the signal never propagates, you'll never know there is a problem. The act of separating Signal from Noise is the Essence of the Art.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > Moderation is not necessary to communication. Every generation, I've seen this assertion. And every generation, it is tested and immediately fails. Usenet had unmoderated channels. The better ones were moderated. GameFAQs had LUE (post anything, life, universe and everything), but the memes / board invasions spread so much that GameFAQs was forced to shut it down. (Especially when said "memes" was posting sexually explicit images to children game boards) 4chan was mostly unmoderated. But Gamergate happened and the moderators decided to ban doxing and gamergate politics, so 8chan happened. 8chan became an ally of Gamergate and championed free speech. but then doxing and swatting got too serious, so the mods started banning people. -------- If you make an unmoderated channel today, you're immediately going to draw in the filthiest individuals: the ones who want to swat and dox for fun. The "trolling community" is always looking for new hosts, because they keep getting banned from legitimate circles. To control the doxers and swatters, you need to ban them from your server. This requires an identity protocol (NickServ, or some other username mechanism). That way, you ban the ones who keep doxing / swatting, and keep the rest of the crowd.
nextaccountic 5y ago
> They need to be the one talked to yesterday and agreed to talk again today. At x location at Y time. For this you need identity. So at the bare minimum, nickserv should be baked in the protocol.

dragontamer 5y ago

But that's not in fact how IRC ever worked. IRC was still made after the first flamewars happened on Usenet. IRC is a "2nd generation" internet product in some regards. We care about identity because we want to know your posting history before we make a moderation decision. We need to know if you're here to troll, or if you're here to contribute. Its not a happy-go-lucky free world, it never was. There will be an ocean of trolls if only because bored 15-something year olds don't have anything better to do. --------- Its worse today, because we know that the troll-factor has in fact become "weaponized". Literally, through "swatting" and "doxxing", the simple use of information over the internet can become a deadly weapon in of itself. Even without swatting and doxing, there's other unsavory behaviors that should be moderated. -------- As always, one of the biggest internet debates is moderation vs unmoderation. Just like the good old days, your alt.* unmoderated Usenet groups arguing for unmoderated servers, while more "serious" usenet groups wanted more control to keep the spammers out.

salawat 5y ago
You're still falling into the identity trap. Speaker. Listener. Medium. Message. That's it. Anything else is a control mechanism layered on top. Moderation is not necessary to communication. Rather, it is necessary to facilitate some kinds of communication over others, and the concept of identity makes that a far easier and more effective a lever to apply to facilitated signal amplification. It all comes back to the age old question at the heart of net neutrality: dumb tubes, or marketplace of traffic valuation through optimization and classification of traffic provenance. One necessarily excludes the other. Both have rather undesirable failure states. Dumb pipes means hello spam. The other side means hello memory holing and censorship. In the end, you can survive the spam with enough patience and filtering. You can't survive malicious pruning or preemptive packet drop. The information either propagates, or it doesn't. I'd say there is greater utility overall in info propagating than not. Even for the most abhorrent types of info. You at least know of the horror out there, and that you need to investigate if the info propagates. If the signal never propagates, you'll never know there is a problem. The act of separating Signal from Noise is the Essence of the Art.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > Moderation is not necessary to communication. Every generation, I've seen this assertion. And every generation, it is tested and immediately fails. Usenet had unmoderated channels. The better ones were moderated. GameFAQs had LUE (post anything, life, universe and everything), but the memes / board invasions spread so much that GameFAQs was forced to shut it down. (Especially when said "memes" was posting sexually explicit images to children game boards) 4chan was mostly unmoderated. But Gamergate happened and the moderators decided to ban doxing and gamergate politics, so 8chan happened. 8chan became an ally of Gamergate and championed free speech. but then doxing and swatting got too serious, so the mods started banning people. -------- If you make an unmoderated channel today, you're immediately going to draw in the filthiest individuals: the ones who want to swat and dox for fun. The "trolling community" is always looking for new hosts, because they keep getting banned from legitimate circles. To control the doxers and swatters, you need to ban them from your server. This requires an identity protocol (NickServ, or some other username mechanism). That way, you ban the ones who keep doxing / swatting, and keep the rest of the crowd.

nextaccountic 5y ago

> They need to be the one talked to yesterday and agreed to talk again today. At x location at Y time. For this you need identity. So at the bare minimum, nickserv should be baked in the protocol.