[pmoriarty]

You could ignore people on IRC too, choose whether or not to join a particular channel or not, and choose which people to message in private.

The problems I've run in to on it is that that some channels on IRC were run by powertripping assholes, and you'd get banned for disagreeing with them or having different opinions.... even if you were perfectly polite, didn't threaten or harass anyone, etc.

Of course, you could just go somewhere else... on to another channel, another network, or off IRC entirely... the internet's a big place.

Still, the fact that some popular channels were dominated by assholes and there weren't viable alternatives to them sometimes is a problem for people wanting to participate in a large public space.

[jerojero]

The problem I had is that the space I created in the beginning was quite nice, and we had lots of nice people in it. But as word spread that people wouldn't get banned we started getting a lot of "undesirable" people, people that had been banned from every other place (and for good reason). In the end, it drove everyone else away and the channel died because once everyone was gone there was no reason for these undesirable people to stick either.

In many ways, these people don't really care about having a space to say things and instead they want a space to be able to say it to people who don't want to hear it. It is why they don't actually use the spaces they've created for themselves like parlor or truth social. They want to tell trans people that they are not valid, they want to tell women to stop having abortions, they want to tell black people that they're criminals, etc. They need an audience. And if you allow them to have it, what ends up happening is that these people being insulted and belittled will leave.

[danjoredd]

That happened to me on a Discord server I was a mod of. Too much fighting and genuine hatred led us to just shut the place down. While it was small it was fine, but after it grew it began being intolerable and all of us mods decided to just shelve it. Nobody can post, but now its just a place to store Discord emojis and stickers

[amadeuspagel]

Yeah, I think that's a big reason we've moved on from chatrooms to networks like twitter, where everyone creates their own moderated space.

[pmoriarty]

"Yeah, I think that's a big reason we've moved on from chatrooms to networks like twitter, where everyone creates their own moderated space"

You can do exactly the same thing on IRC... and IRC had that a long time before Twitter even existed.

[amadeuspagel]

Not quite the same thing. Yes everyone can create their own IRC channel. But in practice ... On twitter everyone tweets and blocks people.