It's certainly not obvious to me, as someone who never ventured on IRC, that IRC culture would have a serious impact on minority representation. Most people (m

It's certainly not obvious to me, as someone who never ventured on IRC, that IRC culture would have a serious impact on minority representation. Most people (minority or not) were never on IRC to begin with, so I doubt that would explain (for instance) the under-representation of minorities in Computer Science programs. I mean, you say that IRC was virulently anti-gay, and yet gay and trans people are over-represented in tech. Even if we accept that IRC culture drove minorities away from tech, that doesn't justify common corporate DEI policies such as affirmative action, unconscious bias training, etc. Those are just bad, counter-productive polices. > 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. You are generalizing from you own experience, expect others to do the same. And, to be fair, they probably aren't saying that your experience didn't happen, but that it either wasn't representative, or that you are misinterpreting some of it.