I can say with experience that there was an assumption that these groups were pretty much all white men and boys. Maybe not everywhere all the time, but enough. I wouldn't categorize it as virulent, but I would say that a lot of insensitive things were written about minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. It's like when you go back to watch Friends and cringe at all the anti-gay jokes. Is it virulent? I guess not. Is it fun to watch if you're gay? I doubt it.

Yet the n-bomb, gay and b*tch and other words as a universal slur and negative adjective were everywhere on irc. Casual rape references were constant, it was about as bad as Xbox voice chat. I have trouble going back and reading much of bash.org's top 100 due to the things you're claiming didn't exist. http://bash.org/?99060 http://bash.org/?5775 http://bash.org/?23601

Just because you didn't mean it or it didn't bother you doesn't mean it wasn't hostile to others.

Wow, forgot about bash.org but that's a good reference to pull. Definitely a microcosm of IRC culture at the time.

Wow, solid resource:

http://bash.org/?121764

><p00p> why do you crackers steal everything from us?

http://bash.org/?51331

>(@virt) cracker barrel is the most hilarious name for a place where a bunch of white people go

http://bash.org/?86009

><Gabe> It's sad when white people try to talk like black inner city people. It's doubly sad when those white people are European. :P

Incredibly virulent anti-whiteness. Thank you for posting this to open our eyes to this.

* * *

Low ranking based on what? Are you telling people what feelings they should have towards slurs directed towards them? The "top quotes" don't bother me at all, for example.

Low ranking based on the number of votes they got. That's the green (or red) number in parentheses between the plus and minus signs. The top 100 quotes range from 9,000 to 41,000. If I refresh random a few times, the most common number of votes seems to be in the mid-100s, which is exactly where these fall.

So the fact that

- you had to search to find a couple low ranking quotes that might be insulting to white people

- there are numerous top ranking quotes that might be insulting to women, gay people, black people, etc

- those top quotes don't bother you

supports OP's point and undermines your own.

Votes have no relation to how much any quote exemplifies IRC culture.

Bash.org is not IRC or IRC culture, despite being built on IRC logs.

Votes are skewed because the demographic is skewed. But the sentiments remain the same in all groups.

Just because one group speaks loudly about hate doesn't mean the quiet group doesn't hate. But it doesn't mean they do, either.

It's a complex topic that would require considerable research, rather than all parties skimming.

> the third one is definitely an example of anti-Blackness, not anti-whiteness.

Why do you capitalize the b but not the w?

None of that is good? That's the point.

You're just proving their point -- these types of communities follow "Internet chat" trends which includes toxicity to literally everyone. Minorities are affected most by this dynamic. By moving the discussions "above ground", we force the discussions to use professional etiquette, and move the conversation closer to where it can have actual impact

anything on bash.org is pretty solidly mid->late era IRC, not "early IRC" as was discussed above.

"Early IRC" ends with The Great Split (ircnet fork). Heck, most of Early IRC is extremely Euro-centric even.

ngl the implication that something happened in the world of irc that turned it from this apolitical, progressive utopia to a jew-joke, rape-joke, -ism-everywhere cesspool is fascinating and please tell me more about it, not sarcastic

IRC back in those days was more oriented towards central/northern european university students...specifically nerds. In the 90s, they mostly would have been talking about lan parties, actual parties, drinking, drugs, software/media piracy, etc.

As we did.

I don't know how much of a cesspool it would have been back then as IRCOps back in that day were famously proactive, thin-skinned and intolerant of divisive bullshit. Generally trolls were k-lined quickly. Especially because operating a server then was an individual's labour of love and not using large, corporate resources. Server operators had to keep trash off their server in order to stay in their network. Individual servers could only handle _hundreds_ of connected users.

It was neither utopian, nor progressive. It was ruthless, impersonal and dog-eat-dog.

The shift towards what it is now was that the resources to operate a network became absurdly cheap and caring about who was on your network and doing what went completely out the window.

Tbh there are communities that refuse to stop using homophobic slurs, especially the rap community with which the black community is heavily involved (see T.I. defending Dababy's homophobic rant "If Lil Nas X can kick his shit in peace… so should DaBaby" ie if people can be gay then people should be able to be homophobic). Pretty despicable considering these people likely have incredibly personal experiences with being victims of x-isms.

Realistically it shows that we (humans) still have much to learn about treating each other equally. Why can't we just be good to each other. :/

Why would I be joking? I'm glad you didn't have a negative experience, but my point wasn't about you. You are not a "we" in the masses of the internet.

You don't have to know anything about anyone to say derogatory things about a group they identify with. Just look at the bigotry shared on social media today.

Do you think it’s impossible to say something racist without specifically directing it at someone in the conversation?

It's hard to characterize with absolutes. There were a lot of different networks and channels in IRC. It's true it was anonymous, but I'm also sure there were inappropriate jokes, perceptions, etc, shared in IRC.

to be fair "there are no girls on the internet" is technically somewhat misogynistic and was a popular meme of the era.

I've never heard this and there were plenty of girls on IRC

Well if you've never heard that old joke, then clearly it can't ever have existed, right?

Oh wait:

> Welcome to the Internet, where the men are men, the women are men, and the kids are cops.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546789

I picked this instance of course because it was said on HN, but it was a dead horse even in 2010.

by 2010 IRC was largely replaced by social media except for niche communities, sorry you were on there in the wrong decade

Of course it was, but that's not what we're talking about. The link I chose was just the arbitrary one I picked from the google results.

Personally I remember hearing that joke in the 90s. If you want a different example, here's a variant from 2001: http://www.bash.org/?2832

Note that this one ends with "but some of the men are really women"; it's already old and well-known enough in '01 that people are modifying it for meta-humor.

If there's a text box anywhere, the first thing people will type into it is the n-word

What I loved the most about IRC is no one cared about your age too! I was very passionate about tech since early primary school. But I couldn't really share this passion with anyone, being a little kid.

Once I got dialup (in middle-school) and could join IRC channels, I realised, no one would know, how young I was. It felt great.