I mean, "Fuchs" for example means far more to me than whatever the name on their drivers license is. Typically the only time I find out someone's real name on IRC is when their obituary gets posted!

Also, their privacy policy does begin by listing one of the parties as the Swedish nonprofit organization Libera Chat.

I guess you are right.

> Swedish nonprofit organization Libera Chat

Which could not be found in the national registry. Compare to https://www.kth.se/en/om/kontakt/kontakt-kth-1.1947 which promptly resolves to https://www.allabolag.se/2021003054/kungliga-tekniska-hogsko...

("freenodegate")

Count me out of this scam.

It's odd to only get a mail address - policy at libera dot chat - and no further formal contact information of the non-profit as a legal entity in Sweden.

I suppose you could try an inquiry via the Swedish tax office asking them for a formal statement from the public record. I don't know any Swedish but I suppose there might be a search engine which lists public information about non-profits?

Even so, there are other hints: the footer features a link to a Github organization where you can easily track development in the open. Of course, that still doesn't give the project a clear, identifiable "face" or formal point of contact.

Other commenters argue "anonymity is how Freenode got big, and how the Internet used to work and that's perfectly fine since it fosters trust."

I think this only holds so much water today. It's not about a relationship between users of a service which provides the affordances to hide behind an anonymous handle. This is about the relationship between users and the operators of a service. You trust that an operator "won't do harm" when you log onto their service.

Such trust is tenuous at best if the decade has demonstrated. Legal frameworks such as the GDPR and privacy laws exist for the exact purpose of protecting users, and creating a legal liability on the part of all too zealous operators of services.

Moreover, the GDPR framework actively tries to de-incentivize gathering and storing any personal data which can be tracked to identifiable individuals without due cause.

Testing Libera Chat's trustworthiness would be, theoretically, as easy as sending a formal subject access request under the GDPR rules to the listed mail address.

Now, I'm aware that all of this are round about ways of figuring out whether this service is legit. It would help if their website just listed formal contact and legal details that identify the legal entity which can be held liable.

Then there's Freenode Ltd which is a UK company. Since Brexit, the GDPR doesn't apply. Given the latest publicly published updates, I don't feel similarly confident about the credibility of any statements regarding the safeguarding of personal data, nor backed by a similarly strong legal framework as far as my own rights go (I'm not acquainted with British privacy laws).

I wasn't able to find Libera Chat there, though it might simply be the case that the registration has not been finalized yet.

If the organization hasen’t created a decree and elected a board, then it will not count as juridical person.

[Edited slightly]

https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/personal-data/

Asking someone for a "true name" was consider to be impolite if not offensive.

I can’t say from a male perspective. But I think it’s not as black and white as you paint it.

The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care.

There is, however, a sad truth of the internet: that people are free to try to antagonise anyone they want without major repercussions; being a woman is something to bring up if you are one of those. But those people would find another reason anyway, I truly don’t believe it’s “because” a person is female.

So “male passing”, on IRC, about technical topics, is “human passing” in most cases, and when it’s not, nobody seems to really care, or that’s what I’ve been told.

Not mentioning your gender when you have a gender-neutral username means people “don’t really care” you’re a woman because they just assume you’re a man. But often the mere mention of the fact you’re a woman, however relevant to the discussion, is viewed as “constantly talking about” your gender.

This is how "Tits or GTFO" came about. i.e. denigrating yourself is the only way to be treated differently from everyone else.

I'm not entirely sure if we've progressed or regressed from that.

This is the problem, isn’t it? The women who state (not “announce” - never in my 25+ years on the internet have I attended an anon user gender reveal) their gender online and then dare to request they’re treated the same as their peers. They want to be treated differently than women are usually treated online. Equal to male and anon users.

Thats not to say I've never seen discrimination of any sort on irc. It's usually troll behaviors I see there, and general hate.

The point being that whatever noble intention was behind this anonymity, the simple fact of being a woman (or not a man) was enough to make you stand out. Therefore, a woman would have fewer problems if they either kept their own gender out of it, played along with the guys who would happily talk about women in questionable ways, or stuck only to conversations where all of that could remain ambiguous.

Prior to that infamous date, either the custom was Mr. or Sir, or the like. Or, more commonly, was whatever nickname you chose for yourself. Some names have a more feminine sound, while others had more masculine. Yet more were androgynous. Yet when AoL decided to become the gateway to the internet, is when we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time, the old guard of the internet didn't know how to handle it - we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it.

It really didn't start turning really bad until these Web 2.0 companies started linking payment gateways to real names. Overnight, your account would be locked/banned for "fake names or transgender names"... And companies like Facebook would use your friends as that proof. And of course, we know how all that is turning out - it's just as unsafe for women (or really anyone "different") walking on a sidewalk as it is with their real name online.

Fortunately, there's still fringes on the internet. I don't know if you're male, female, young, old, disabled, ,black, white, native, asian, from a different country, etc.... If we leave it out of the discussion, its unimportant. HN is most definitely not one of those areas, as the assumption is that you're a white, probably male, tech worker, and that you're happy with venture capital and startups.

(I really don't want to mention those quieter areas, as it reminds us of our old ideas of the internet and all the wonders we imagined it could do... Unlike today's marketing hell, capitalistic cesspool, and emotional monetization. It doesn't have to be like that.)

Now granted, I have only been online in various forms since 1992 (first on BBSs, then on the Internet occasionally in 1994, and then pretty much continuously since 1996), but I can tell you with a "vaguely feminine" name (Yvan, which is a French name, and any native speaker will tell you it's a male name) and almost 30 years of online activity under my real name, I can tell you that Internet has been a shitty place pretty much since the nerd realized he could stalk a classmate through the university mail system, and probably even before then.

I don't get where Yvan would be confusing either. Weird people out there.

Although I honestly do have fond memories of the late 80's BBS era. But to the point those were local and largely only psudo-anonymous.

The Sysop knew who everyone was if they verified users. And here, at the time, the cost of calls greatly limited connection range. People were locals.

> we.

Whatever group you are magnanimously attempting to represent, utterly fucking failed. You point the finger at the The Eternal September, but how many of those 'Septembers' did you (`we`) preside over before that? Failing one time after another until you give up and realise that, actually, the internet is for everyone.

> we've always dealt with a higher class of people, and these distinctly weren't it.

I'm not going to make the obvious reference to a Trilby hat--often tipped-- here, yet through my clever style of writing I actually just did.

> we saw that "average" (aka: racist, sexist, homophobic, different-phobic) people join for the first time

Different-phobic conveniently excluding your (as in, the group behind your `we`) disappointment at the unwashed masses finding the internet.

--

I appreciate you trying to do this detached 'yet curiously' thing but the fact is that nothing has changed. I dare say it's worse.

That sounds right to me, and matches up with my experiences back then. Nobody really cared as long as you weren't trying to make it the basis of your identity and constantly talking about it. A lot of women didn't want to announce their gender because they didn't want special treatment. Of course in some cases that meant sexual attention, but the difference between then and now was that there wasn't as much sexual harassment and fear online.

During the period in question, IRC (EFNet) was governed for many years by Helen Rose, known as Trillian.

Back in my IRC days in the 90s (from somewhere around '91) I only knew people on (German) #Linuxger, #Linux.de and #Java.de channel by nick, no clue about gender or anything beside Linux and Java.

Ah the times of Nickbot.

Years later when some people met IRL for the first time, everyone was suprised about everyone else.

(this was some years before the WWW, and before digital photography etc.)

Any woman had to be constantly on the lookout. If she wanted to discuss her date, she would be outed. If she mentioned that she was in a profession dominated by women, or even that she didn't go in to the office for a job, she would be known as female and harassed.

Every single woman had to think about that, every single day, in every communication. "Passing as neuter" requires a lot of work, because like computer security, any slipup is irrevocable. It's tiring to do. Not exhausting, but just one more thing to be thinking about in addition to everything else on your mind, which men simply didn't.

Men spoke unfiltered, and a lot of grief is expressed by men today being told, "No, you may not make racist jokes. No, you may not hit on every single person on the Internet just because you think they are female." They object, but to women, that's something they've done every single day of their online lives.

But:

> bragging about your genitalia,

If you’re not doing this ironically, then what the fuck communities are you in?

> talking about your wife

Women can have wives, but sure, this is more valid than the other examples. People do talk about spouses/partners.

> even hinting at clues like your favorite truck or beer

Women -definitely- can like these things. Seems awfully sexist of you to assume not.

Of course. The point the commenter was making was that if they don't, or if they like other things, speaking up about those things isn't equally easy.

Which, by the way, is what the entire rest of the comment explained. Ignoring the substance of the comment leaves the impression that you're just trying to score a cheap point with an offhand accusation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(pronoun)#Gender

(Wikipedia sources https://web.archive.org/web/20120530024829/http://www.nytime...)

Of course:

> More recently, this use of he has become less accepted, and singular they is becoming the dominant form

But linguistic change isn't a binary process, nobody flips a switch and everyone across the world updates their habits, so it takes time.

While gender neutral he was not encouraged when I was in school, singular they was very much discouraged, with "he or she" being the taught solution for a single person of unknown gender. Of course, in today's world that also is going out of favour.

What newsgroups did Chaucer post to?

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/he#Middle_English-they [2]: https://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/pronunciation/gr.html...

The singular "they" has been prescribed in manuals of style since the 1700s[0], continuously through the 20th century. That certainly predates the heyday of Usenet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(pronoun)#Gender

It really was a lot more about what you brought to the table than identity.

And even then, everyone's still a dog.

Apparently a Pew poll came to similar conclusions. The only area in which women reported significantly worse harassment was regarding stalking. On the other hand, men were almost twice as likely to be physically threatened. It really seems like a wash to me.[1]

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2014/10/22/online-haras...

There was a study, might have been Pew, but I can't find it.

Gaming is a cesspool of edgy teenagers (hence people screaming the N-word in various lobbies) it's not really limited to women.

That being said playing any FPS with voice chat as a girl/woman makes for a pitiful experience. My gf won't play Rainbow Six Siege anymore because she kept getting team killed for making callouts.

The Internet of old treated them as equivalent, which (it turns out) was pretty implicitly exclusionary. When someone found out a handle was tied to a man, it wasn't news; tied to a woman, it was.

The Hacker Manifesto said it nicely:

"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike."

http://www.phrack.org/archives/issues/7/3.txt

EDIT: well fuck me for sharing, right? 2021 Hacker News karma scores are fucking cold.

I wonder what other words can be used as a pronoun?

Basically anything you can use in place of a name, so long as the grammatical usage is namelike.

"That guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a noun

"Guy doesn't have a clue." -- guy is a pronoun (you can tell because "he" also works grammatically)

However, I think these would need to be in the initial position(s) when slash-delimiting one's pronouns, because the final position is for a possessive form. That is, they're analogous to "he" but not analogous to "his" (and using them like "him" would be a stretch, as far as I can figure...), which might be what got GP in hot water.

You don't think that's merely people being lazy and leaving off a word that can be inferred ('That')? This is something I often do in casual conversation, particularly vocal conversations:

"I am wondering what you mean" - 'I' is a pronoun

"Wondering what you mean" - 'Wondering' is now the pronoun??? Clearly not. It's just a way that people are lazy and sloppy with grammar when correct grammar isn't important.

But to answer your "wondering" question: nope, because "he/him/his," nor their analogues (person, number, gender, etc.), don't work there.

* - that is to say, each individual instance (drip) wouldn't cause pain, but when you face it almost constantly, and you're already hyperaware of it, it can cause a lot of anguish.

I left the community because it just upset me to have to do that. a/s/l always broke my heart and it still does.

I would find it deeply wrong if HN were to ask for the gender of their users, let alone their sexual preferences, but I would expect the same of a dating site.

But I don't disagree with you in general. I also miss the intimacy a nick could afford you. Somehow you could talk about deeper things when nobody knew your name.

Believe it or not but cis white western men were and still are subject to all manners of harassment and offensive jokes. As a cis white western man myself I personally have experienced harassment online.

"If you did not pass as a cit het white man you would likely be harassed for it on the early internet."

is not the same thing as

"If you were harassed on the early internet then you must not have passed as a cis het white man."

During a safety meeting at a lumber yard you wouldn't respond to "workers who use the malfunctioning machine in building A have been getting injured" by saying, "well I didn't use that machine and I also got injured."

The way you worded it sounded like you were as explicit as you can be without explicitly saying that men are not harassed. You said you either adopt the persona of a man OR you are harassed. You also said you gave up and learned to talk like a man (to stop certain harassment). Both of these implies that you are not harassed if you act like a man.

>During a safety meeting at a lumber yard you wouldn't respond to "workers who use the malfunctioning machine in building A have been getting injured" by saying, "well I didn't use that machine and I also got injured."

There is a difference in your original post and your analogy due to the use of the word 'or' in the original post. If you go to a restaurant and they ask if you want salad or soup as a side dish they are not implying you get both, but one or the other.

It is too bad in English we do not have xor to prevent such confusions.

People are too forthcoming on the internet today, with some divulging almost their entire being to the megacorp spy machines. It's easy for stalkers, let alone adtech and three letter agencies, to find and track people.

I prefer today's tech, but yesterday's freedom, mindset, and lack of tracking.

Ie, think DALnet and the explosion of minor IRC networks in the 95-98s

We would joke about it in programming channels, but people really did use it in non-programming channels.

I mean, I am not disagreeing that the "old internet way" has it's perks. But it is also the lack of any formal organization or legal rights that let one person who had enough money/power to do so destroy freenode by claiming he owned it.

You want that not to happen again, you might want to do something different. And indeed the announcement acknowledges that, that's why there is "a non-profit association in Sweden, with all our staff holding equal stakes" in the first place. It would just be helpful for a bit more transparency around that too. I personally assume it will come, it's just an oversight (no pun intended).

The person that "sold" freenode didn't clearly have the authority to do so. The community disagrees on what they actually "bought". But baring a formal legal structure... they got away with it.

The comment at the top of this thread was talking about how, if one wanted to try to reduce the chance of that sort of thing happening again before investing energy in this new thing, one would want to know more about the formal legal structure and who is behind it.

The "old internet" way is "We're just some people cooperating, we don't need a legal structure or even to know each other's real names." That has plusses and minuses. One of the minuses is when someone decides they have the authority to sell the whole thing to someone else for personal profit, even though all the people informally cooperating didn't agree to it, and it turns out it's hard to stop them.

1: http://www.hackles.org/

I would regularly change my IRC nick. For a period, I went by "cassandra" (Greek mythology, and no I'm not Michael Burry) and would get endlessly harassed and involuntarily flirted with.

Worst was forgetting the nick thing and having someone strike up a genuine-seeming conversation only to turn around and ask for risque photos, once they ineptly believed they had established enough "rapport" to do so.

I remember one time that after having been in the same channel with a user and chatting to them almost every day for 10 years, they finally revealed that they were female not male. That was a real revelation. The same could be said for people who you assumed were from the Anglosphere but turned out to be Indian, African, or from other far-flung places. The point is, none of this mattered. What mattered was your intelligence, knowledge, problem-solving ability, and programming chops.

In many respects, the Old Internet Way was better than the New Internet Way.

The internet was the only place I was treated as an adult, an equal. As I got older I no longer felt the need to hide my age to be treated that way, but I really hope kids of today can find a similar place.

People on the Old Internet assumed you were "like them". If they're a white, 25 year old american male, they're going to assume you are a white, 20-something american male by default. You can correct them, but… why would you care? Back then we didn't really try to paint a picture of who we are in real life. Like you said, all that mattered was what you would concretely bring to the table. Trying to emphasize your age, gender or nationality would be seen as rude in an "is that what you're bringing to the table?" kind of way (less of an issue in the case of nationality as RL meetups became more common, and especially less of an issue in europe-centric international groups where your location could in fact be something you're bringing to the table).

There's a lot of valid criticism of the Old Internet and it wasn't a perfect place. Sexism was certainly rampant. So was ageism. But in a much more practical sense, it was way the fuck more egalitarian than what we have now.

The solution here is trust neither freenode nor Libera.chat, but use them cautiously. Eventually one will implode and a more complete story will emerge.

I think many were caught off guard by the legal setup of freenode that allowed it to be sold, including all the staff that resigned and founded Libera Chat.

With that in mind, the lesson to take from that is to make sure the legal structure and ownership of the new service is more clearly documented and understood by everyone.

At the very least the legal name of this new non-profit they have established should be clearly displayed on the web page somewhere.

We're talking about networks and communities here. Those aren't as interchangeable as things we buy.

That's because we are ensconced in a framework of corporate and consumer protection laws that makes that generally safe to do and provides legal recourse when it isn't. Even so, fraud and bad experiences with businesses happen all the time.

Isn't that exactly who they're aiming for though?

Was subjected to a corporate takeover? This happened, but it's hard to see the cause and effect, and the proposed solution is basically to do this out the gate.

Didn't become discord? Was that a goal? To be a big VC funded chat service with lots of users and a looming prospect of having to be profitable without losing them.

Wasn't a profitable business? It was always intended as a non-profit, and it's not clear they were running out of money to run the network without sponsorship, but rather used it to set up new events like freenode live.

When that Zuck quote happened, Facebook didn't require real names.

Discord is a company. You can look it up, there are contact points - abuse, legal, etc. People who put their community there trust the entity running Discord.

I'd prefer to trust someone I actually know, and with that, I'm fully on board with librachat, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have a real, visible legal entity behind them.

I was never talking about the community on top of a platform, but the platform itself.

That's not true. The problem with anonymity or pseudonymity is that there is no way to trace bad behavior beyond the persona and back to the person behind it. A single person can even adopt multiple personas, some of which may be trustworthy, others not. The use of real names constrains this kind of gaming of the system and so makes trustworthiness easier and more reliable to establish.

This is not to say that the costs of using real names outweighs the benefits. They may very well not. But to say that there are no benefits to using real names in terms of establishing trust is just wrong.

Distrust is cognitively taxing, so naturally it is easier to simply trust subject(s) because of real name, title, etc ...

The other way around also works (e.g., Facebook has all the impressum and contact pages you want, but it's the least trustful tech company out there).