[michaelmrose]

Every organization in which the people have real autonomy and power is literally an invented arbitrary bureaucracy. You just invented a really long way to describe civilization.

People don't like it when money trumps all other factors in a concern that perceptively wasn't for sale and threats and dishonesty don't help either.

It appears that nearly everyone involved believes there is a problem including Lee who now needs new paid staff to run what is likely a dwindling community. It sounds like you have an ax to grind personally.

[ok123456]

Nah. I've seen much larger IRC networks run with a fraction of the officiousness and ornery behavior from freenode "staffers".

It's not a general problem with civilization needing "law and order" or whatever.

[Macha]

Isn't Freenode the largest IRC network by a significant margin?

https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php

[pop11]

Click 2005. Observe Y axis.

[Macha]

I'm not sure early 00s IRC networks are a success story of light touch, politics free organisation.

[ok123456]

Those same networks are still functioning with much less proportionate overhead.

They're also much more technically competent. Look at how the different networks handled the cross-protocol exploit a few years back where a well crafted link could cause the browser to connect to irc and spam. Most other networks required a PING/PONG on connect so they weren't vulnerable. Of the networks that didn't, they were able to mitigate that within minutes to hours by either a simple configuration change or a firewall rule. Freenode was unable to do anything for months. Their solution was to rewrite their entire ircd and tell people not to complain about the spam.

[michaelmrose]

Do you mean that you had an issue with freenode staff and now enjoy their discomfort.

[ok123456]

Personal attacks are off-topic on hackernews.