8 ms·

Growing up on IRC, I have very much the same experience as you but quite opposite as I experienced hardly any racism, and nobody knew my identity either. Nobod

by aliqot 4y ago

Growing up on IRC, I have very much the same experience as you but quite opposite as I experienced hardly any racism, and nobody knew my identity either. Nobody wanted to involve their personal lives or details until recently when identity and identifying became the thing.

John23832 4y ago
It's not about telling people your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, it's about WHAT IS SAID about your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. The beauty of the internet is anonymity (to a certain extent), but that doesn't mean that you can't see or hear things that exclude you.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Exactly. The old saying was "The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog." ... except they didn't mean dog, and we never said why it might matter what you are or what other people were assuming you were absent further information.
  - catiopatio 4y ago
    No, we literally meant dog. It was a joke. Why might it matter? Because the rest of the world was a lot more racist and sexist, but IRC wasn’t.
    - spoiler 4y ago
      No, no. You need other people to tell you what you meant. It's how things work now. Don't you dare think otherwise! And now we're doing this whole "guilty of X by technology choice". /s Where and when does this this neurosis stop?
    - some_furry 4y ago
      The joke is even funnier if you're a furry, and the entire point of your online persona is people knowing you're a dog. (Even if your fursona actually is, say, a cat. The joke is enhanced.)
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      > but IRC wasn’t No, sorry, I was there. That's the key thing people need to remember about the Old Internet. Some of IRC was extremely racist and sexist. Almost all of the rest was "regular" racist and sexist. It was pretty closely related to 4chan culture (under-moderated by outside forces that had little power to force any particular standards upon the moderators). The magic of the medium was that since everything was text, nobody knew you were the butt of the joke and you could pretend you weren't. But go mask-off and admit you were a woman or a minority, and oh boy. Good luck with that. Good thing it's easy to change your handle, right? There's a reason anonymity as a virtue grew in that space: it protected people from those who hadn't left their IRL baggage behind by letting people pretend to be the "default" (which was almost always white men). We made a mistake believing the online space wasn't the real world. It was. It was just the real world where you could pretend to be something else. That was good at the time; it let more people participate by donning masks. But we should aim for better.
      - mwcampbell 4y ago
        Saying we should aim for better sounds nice, but I fear that bias and prejudice based on things that shouldn't matter is an incurable part of human nature, and anonymity, and using text for everything, would be our best defense. I say "would be" because I doubt that I can convince a large enough percentage of people, including my own cofounder, to use anonymized text chat for important things like interviews and work conversations. Especially the "text chat" part since, at least for now, talking is still much faster and smoother for most of us than accurate text input. But I can dream.
      - mensetmanusman 4y ago
        IRC isn’t a place, it’s a platform for speech for lots of diverse groups, some of which were/are racist. Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist.
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        Yes. It's a generalization. ... but it's also a true generalization, in the sense that if you throw a dart at a random IRC channel across all networks, you'll proabably hit one where the level of tolerated racism and sexism is at least "American standard." > Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist I completely agree.
  - sinity 4y ago
    Of course they meant dog. Which is a placeholder for _anything else_.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      > they meant dog > which is a placeholder for ... exactly. It's a placeholder; not literal. It's a placeholder because if the New Yorker had run a comic that said "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a black man," that wouldn't have been funny at all.
      - godelski 4y ago
        Definitely no hints to that in the cartoon at all. None... none at all... >.> <.< >.> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....
  - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
    >> except they didn't mean dog The quote is from a 1993 New Yorker cartoon which literally has two dogs talking. See the original image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.... 'Dog' could be a placeholder, but the cartoon showed dogs.
    - John23832 4y ago
      Dog was used a a euphemism for undesirable. In the more specific case of the image, black. Look at the color of the dogs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
      - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
        Maybe. Maybe not. It was newsprint, so the color is not clear. Maybe the dog was brown: https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1862.gif https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1862.gif Not that it matters much. I agree with the quote from the Wikipedia article: Sociologist Sherry Turkle elaborates: "You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. They don't look at your body and make assumptions. They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words."
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        > All they see are your words. Correct. And the mistake we made was assuming that that implied they weren't making assumptions.
        bigbillheck 4y ago
        > It was newsprint Not in the New Yorker it wasn't.
  - slavik81 4y ago
    > The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog That comic meant a lot to me. When I was growing up, I found that most adults would treat me with condescension. On the internet, I could engage in conversation as an equal. Anonymity didn't change the prejudices that people held, but it did change my experience.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      I agree, and I had a similar formative experience. There's a great quote about being alive during the era of the moon landing that also resonates with me on this topic: "It was as if all of us, all over the world, had been given permission to dream big dreams." I think it was a strict step forward over the previous status quo but (not unlike the changes to American culture after military necessity broke racial segregation barriers in the military during World War II) it's not the final step.
- catiopatio 4y ago
  We focused on technical discussions on technical channels. I’m sorry if you had a bad time on IRC, but as someone who cut their teeth on IRC in the early 90s, and got their career started through contacts made on IRC, what you describe couldn’t be further from the kind of technical communities I participated in.
  - John23832 4y ago
    Great, that's your experience. But I was sharing mine, and those of the other minorities I know very well.
    - trogdor 4y ago
      How do you know the experience of other categories of people very well?
      - John23832 4y ago
        I don't. I only know my experience and the experience of other minorities, that I personally know well, who have convey their experiences to me.
      - spoiler 4y ago
        > EDIT: In the below thread are many people who personally identify as omnipresent IRC Gods, so my experience must have happened in an alternate universe. My bad. There can only be one omnipresent IRC God, and you're talking to them. You can wipe your ass with your experience for all they care. My lord, the lack of self awareness...
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    My experience was a lot of petty interpersonal drama instead of technical discussions, but very little about race.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- busterarm 4y ago
  2/3 of GNAA weren't even white people.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- caeril 4y ago
  [dead]
Quarrelsome 4y ago
I don't remember anyone trying to doxx anyone's race on freenode. Perhaps they're talking about USENET/IRC at large as opposed to the tech community which I believe were mostly on freenode (now libera). Otherwise I can only assume that chats within all-chat appeared to be racist in nature but again, that's not something I've seen (especially unchallenged) in any of the freenode channels I frequented.
- wlonkly 4y ago
  I feel like this might be a bit generational. Not freenode, maybe, but EFnet the decade before? Definitely lots of casual -isms.
kfajdsl 4y ago
I'm much much younger than John23832, but I definitely recognized a lot of the same in some of the gaming communities I was a part of in the mid to late 2010s. There wasn't quite as much racism (at least in the places I hung out), but there was plenty of sexism and homophobia. It wouldn't necessarily be explicit, but there were lots of offhand comments and jokes. That's how racism (and sexism, homophobia, ...) tends to present itself; it's a lot more subtle than people straight up going "I hate ${group}". However, I will say that I first got properly exposed to tech/computing by doing FIRST robotics in high school (2017), and those competitions were very diverse. Everyone I met through FIRST (students and mentors) was very accepting of everyone, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. My college experience (classes, competition team, internships, etc) has thankfully been more of the same.
- John23832 4y ago
  I did FIRST (about 10 years before you, ha). FIRST is a very inclusive space by design. I think it's great.
  - kfajdsl 4y ago
    Ha, that's awesome; I loved meeting the mentors who also did FIRST way back. It's a great program, I credit it for putting me where I am now!
- naasking 4y ago
  > It wouldn't necessarily be explicit, but there were lots of offhand comments and jokes. That's how racism (and sexism, homophobia, ...) tends to present itself; it's a lot more subtle than people straight up going "I hate ${group}". Don't conflate those jokes and offhand comments with hate. You're erasing all sorts of meaningful differences between basically harmless husbands joking about their wives or differences between men and women, and Andrew Tate. It's also a poor tactic to effect change. If you immediately group basically harmless in-group type behaviours like these with actual devastating harm, you make yourself and your objections look silly causing people to dismiss you, and it's far harder to change behaviour after calling someone a hateful bigot, than it is to ask they tone it down because a joke made someone a little uncomfortable. I think you can easily imagine the difference in defensiveness each response might elicit.
doix 4y ago
I was only active on IRC in later years (early 2000's onwards) and there was definitely a lot of casual homophobia. Using 'gay' as a synonym for bad was extremely common, I picked it up as well. Calling someone a fag was done all the time as well, not even always as an insult. I don't think the majority of people using the words were actually homophobic (I wasn't), just copying other people to "fit in" without even thinking of the possibility it was harming someone. I think it was early 2004-05 that someone private messaged me explaining that it sucks when people use the word that way and I stopped. I don't recall much racism against black people, but I can totally see the N word being used casually in the same way in some other servers/channels.

by aliqot 4y ago

John23832 4y ago

It's not about telling people your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, it's about WHAT IS SAID about your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. The beauty of the internet is anonymity (to a certain extent), but that doesn't mean that you can't see or hear things that exclude you.

shadowgovt 4y ago
Exactly. The old saying was "The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog." ... except they didn't mean dog, and we never said why it might matter what you are or what other people were assuming you were absent further information.
- catiopatio 4y ago
  No, we literally meant dog. It was a joke. Why might it matter? Because the rest of the world was a lot more racist and sexist, but IRC wasn’t.
  - spoiler 4y ago
    No, no. You need other people to tell you what you meant. It's how things work now. Don't you dare think otherwise! And now we're doing this whole "guilty of X by technology choice". /s Where and when does this this neurosis stop?
  - some_furry 4y ago
    The joke is even funnier if you're a furry, and the entire point of your online persona is people knowing you're a dog. (Even if your fursona actually is, say, a cat. The joke is enhanced.)
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    > but IRC wasn’t No, sorry, I was there. That's the key thing people need to remember about the Old Internet. Some of IRC was extremely racist and sexist. Almost all of the rest was "regular" racist and sexist. It was pretty closely related to 4chan culture (under-moderated by outside forces that had little power to force any particular standards upon the moderators). The magic of the medium was that since everything was text, nobody knew you were the butt of the joke and you could pretend you weren't. But go mask-off and admit you were a woman or a minority, and oh boy. Good luck with that. Good thing it's easy to change your handle, right? There's a reason anonymity as a virtue grew in that space: it protected people from those who hadn't left their IRL baggage behind by letting people pretend to be the "default" (which was almost always white men). We made a mistake believing the online space wasn't the real world. It was. It was just the real world where you could pretend to be something else. That was good at the time; it let more people participate by donning masks. But we should aim for better.
    - mwcampbell 4y ago
      Saying we should aim for better sounds nice, but I fear that bias and prejudice based on things that shouldn't matter is an incurable part of human nature, and anonymity, and using text for everything, would be our best defense. I say "would be" because I doubt that I can convince a large enough percentage of people, including my own cofounder, to use anonymized text chat for important things like interviews and work conversations. Especially the "text chat" part since, at least for now, talking is still much faster and smoother for most of us than accurate text input. But I can dream.
    - mensetmanusman 4y ago
      IRC isn’t a place, it’s a platform for speech for lots of diverse groups, some of which were/are racist. Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        Yes. It's a generalization. ... but it's also a true generalization, in the sense that if you throw a dart at a random IRC channel across all networks, you'll proabably hit one where the level of tolerated racism and sexism is at least "American standard." > Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist I completely agree.
- sinity 4y ago
  Of course they meant dog. Which is a placeholder for _anything else_.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    > they meant dog > which is a placeholder for ... exactly. It's a placeholder; not literal. It's a placeholder because if the New Yorker had run a comic that said "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a black man," that wouldn't have been funny at all.
    - godelski 4y ago
      Definitely no hints to that in the cartoon at all. None... none at all... >.> <.< >.> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
  >> except they didn't mean dog The quote is from a 1993 New Yorker cartoon which literally has two dogs talking. See the original image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.... 'Dog' could be a placeholder, but the cartoon showed dogs.
  - John23832 4y ago
    Dog was used a a euphemism for undesirable. In the more specific case of the image, black. Look at the color of the dogs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
    - thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
      Maybe. Maybe not. It was newsprint, so the color is not clear. Maybe the dog was brown: https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1862.gif https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1862.gif Not that it matters much. I agree with the quote from the Wikipedia article: Sociologist Sherry Turkle elaborates: "You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. They don't look at your body and make assumptions. They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words."
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        > All they see are your words. Correct. And the mistake we made was assuming that that implied they weren't making assumptions.
      - bigbillheck 4y ago
        > It was newsprint Not in the New Yorker it wasn't.
- slavik81 4y ago
  > The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog That comic meant a lot to me. When I was growing up, I found that most adults would treat me with condescension. On the internet, I could engage in conversation as an equal. Anonymity didn't change the prejudices that people held, but it did change my experience.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    I agree, and I had a similar formative experience. There's a great quote about being alive during the era of the moon landing that also resonates with me on this topic: "It was as if all of us, all over the world, had been given permission to dream big dreams." I think it was a strict step forward over the previous status quo but (not unlike the changes to American culture after military necessity broke racial segregation barriers in the military during World War II) it's not the final step.
catiopatio 4y ago
We focused on technical discussions on technical channels. I’m sorry if you had a bad time on IRC, but as someone who cut their teeth on IRC in the early 90s, and got their career started through contacts made on IRC, what you describe couldn’t be further from the kind of technical communities I participated in.
- John23832 4y ago
  Great, that's your experience. But I was sharing mine, and those of the other minorities I know very well.
  - trogdor 4y ago
    How do you know the experience of other categories of people very well?
    - John23832 4y ago
      I don't. I only know my experience and the experience of other minorities, that I personally know well, who have convey their experiences to me.
    - spoiler 4y ago
      > EDIT: In the below thread are many people who personally identify as omnipresent IRC Gods, so my experience must have happened in an alternate universe. My bad. There can only be one omnipresent IRC God, and you're talking to them. You can wipe your ass with your experience for all they care. My lord, the lack of self awareness...
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  My experience was a lot of petty interpersonal drama instead of technical discussions, but very little about race.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
busterarm 4y ago
2/3 of GNAA weren't even white people.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
caeril 4y ago
[dead]

Quarrelsome 4y ago

I don't remember anyone trying to doxx anyone's race on freenode. Perhaps they're talking about USENET/IRC at large as opposed to the tech community which I believe were mostly on freenode (now libera). Otherwise I can only assume that chats within all-chat appeared to be racist in nature but again, that's not something I've seen (especially unchallenged) in any of the freenode channels I frequented.

wlonkly 4y ago
I feel like this might be a bit generational. Not freenode, maybe, but EFnet the decade before? Definitely lots of casual -isms.

kfajdsl 4y ago

I'm much much younger than John23832, but I definitely recognized a lot of the same in some of the gaming communities I was a part of in the mid to late 2010s. There wasn't quite as much racism (at least in the places I hung out), but there was plenty of sexism and homophobia. It wouldn't necessarily be explicit, but there were lots of offhand comments and jokes. That's how racism (and sexism, homophobia, ...) tends to present itself; it's a lot more subtle than people straight up going "I hate ${group}". However, I will say that I first got properly exposed to tech/computing by doing FIRST robotics in high school (2017), and those competitions were very diverse. Everyone I met through FIRST (students and mentors) was very accepting of everyone, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. My college experience (classes, competition team, internships, etc) has thankfully been more of the same.

John23832 4y ago
I did FIRST (about 10 years before you, ha). FIRST is a very inclusive space by design. I think it's great.
- kfajdsl 4y ago
  Ha, that's awesome; I loved meeting the mentors who also did FIRST way back. It's a great program, I credit it for putting me where I am now!
naasking 4y ago
> It wouldn't necessarily be explicit, but there were lots of offhand comments and jokes. That's how racism (and sexism, homophobia, ...) tends to present itself; it's a lot more subtle than people straight up going "I hate ${group}". Don't conflate those jokes and offhand comments with hate. You're erasing all sorts of meaningful differences between basically harmless husbands joking about their wives or differences between men and women, and Andrew Tate. It's also a poor tactic to effect change. If you immediately group basically harmless in-group type behaviours like these with actual devastating harm, you make yourself and your objections look silly causing people to dismiss you, and it's far harder to change behaviour after calling someone a hateful bigot, than it is to ask they tone it down because a joke made someone a little uncomfortable. I think you can easily imagine the difference in defensiveness each response might elicit.

doix 4y ago

I was only active on IRC in later years (early 2000's onwards) and there was definitely a lot of casual homophobia. Using 'gay' as a synonym for bad was extremely common, I picked it up as well. Calling someone a fag was done all the time as well, not even always as an insult. I don't think the majority of people using the words were actually homophobic (I wasn't), just copying other people to "fit in" without even thinking of the possibility it was harming someone. I think it was early 2004-05 that someone private messaged me explaining that it sucks when people use the word that way and I stopped. I don't recall much racism against black people, but I can totally see the N word being used casually in the same way in some other servers/channels.