[neilv]

> A lot of the group was great, but some friends I invited to the challenge had a bad time in the irc with transphobes and we all dropped out.

That sucks, and the channel or network should do something about it.

IRC is how I was friends with many trans people, before we knew the word trans.

It makes sense: it was much easier to pass online. So you could just hang out and talk about programming or whatever, and no one cared what plumbing you were born with.

Of course, there were always some people being antisocial on IRC, and that's why there were channel ops, war scripts, and IRCops.

I think I recall one or two occasions when someone attacked a channel I was on, and then later came back and reconciled. There should be more of the learning to play nice with others, but less toxic to start with.

[officeplant]

Yeah it sucks. Since then I've tried to better vet retro tech groups before inviting more friends along. It seems rather unfortunate that more often than not old hardware enthusiast groups come with old beliefs.

Things are much better off at IRL gatherings I've noticed. Vintage Computer Festival events have been very open and welcoming to all peoples without issue in my experience.

[neilv]

Regarding "old beliefs", a distinction I'd like to make...

My anecdotal impression is that early Internet overall was, on average, more enlightened and amiable than Internet today.

Our earlier experience: Nobody knows you're a dog, people are excited about the possibilities, people are open to meeting others around the world, people see others sharing just to share, people haven't been conditioned to intolerant extremism by a couple decades of propaganda, etc.

Today we'll meet intolerance and meanness in many places, and we might want to call that "old beliefs" in that they are outmoded, and want to think that the latest generation will be smarter and OK. But it's certainly not just older people being hostile. And some groups of older people (e.g., much of early Internet) already did it better in many ways, before society backslided. When kids are trying to repair society, they can find allies in older people too.

[neuroticnews25]

It's inherently hard to get along with people you don't share values with, and the culture war got extra vicious. But I wouldn't call the people throwing racial and sexual slurs more intolerant of the outgroup than the other side (the people deciding to get offended), if anything, they seem to have thicker skin when it comes to differences in worldview.

[dosisking]

Early Usenet was similar, there were no flamewars or anything like that.

[defrost]

MINIX having inherent design flaws was simply just a robustly expressed opinion ... it was nothing like the Meow Wars of '98.