Far more immediately impactful change is this:

> For abandoned project channels that have moved or are no longer available to the public, you may request the ownership of the channel be transferred to you.

This effectively legitimizes the sort of takeovers that were discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27246755

If you click down on the file to see what's left in underneath, it continues with loads of duplicate rules which do the same thing. This feels like tidying up to me, as a complete outsider.

They're not actually duplicate rules, even if they look like it. To simplify things:

The rule that was removed:

- Hate speech is not allowed

The rules that are still there:

- Hate speech is discouraged

- Illegal hate speech is not allowed

You'll notice that this has opened up an allowance for legal hate speech, which is merely "discouraged", which of course no malicious actor is going to care about.

Bottom line, yes, hate speech is now allowed.

There's an UK address at the bottom, does this mean that the jurisdiction is UK for considering what is allowed?

There’s been a lot of things going on with Freenode lately.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ev8y/freenode-open-source-...

> In 2017, the then head of staff at Freenode, Christel Dahlskjaer, incorporated it as Freenode Ltd and sold it to Andrew Lee. <...> the incorporation and sale was done just to sponsor a conference.

What a crazy turn of events for such an old project. Thanks for the link.

Title is editorializing. Freenode has removed speech restrictions on a number of subjects.

This isn’t editorialized, the change log literally shows the hate speech rule was removed. They didn’t replace it, they didn’t codify what classifies as hate speech at a different point. They removed it. You can argue on whether or not it’s a good or bad thing, but the rule _was_ removed.

"Freenode removes rule about media trading, game modding, warez, porn, antisocial behavior, and hate speech" would've been fine. From the HN guidelines: Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

Frankly it also comes close to running afoul of the off-topic rule regarding politics.

Political content is allowed, if relevant to HN topics. The guidelines just say "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" meaning that most stories about general politics are off topic, which is common sense.

Editorializing means adding your own commentary beyond the facts. In this case, there is no commentary added to the fact that Freenode removed the hate speech rule.

Posting comments for the mods is often ineffective. If you wish the mods to see and respond to your concern, email your proposed replacement title to the mod’s using the Contact link in the site footer.

The comment is relevant for readers, too. It's an opinion about the article, of which the headline is a part.

It is an opinion about the manner in which the article was posted.

Would you consider an opinion about the manner in which the article was posted to be off-topic for a discussion about the article itself?

I wish this submission had been to a blog post analyzing the changes in the greater context of the diff. That would have made an excellent post.

It is quite a new (and unexpected ) change and I haven't seen such a post yet, but someone is probably writing one up now.

Honestly, that's petty.