Growing up on IRC, I have very much the same experience as you but quite opposite as I experienced hardly any racism, and nobody knew my identity either.
Nobody wanted to involve their personal lives or details until recently when identity and identifying became the thing.
I'm much much younger than John23832, but I definitely recognized a lot of the same in some of the gaming communities I was a part of in the mid to late 2010s. There wasn't quite as much racism (at least in the places I hung out), but there was plenty of sexism and homophobia. It wouldn't necessarily be explicit, but there were lots of offhand comments and jokes. That's how racism (and sexism, homophobia, ...) tends to present itself; it's a lot more subtle than people straight up going "I hate ${group}".
However, I will say that I first got properly exposed to tech/computing by doing FIRST robotics in high school (2017), and those competitions were very diverse. Everyone I met through FIRST (students and mentors) was very accepting of everyone, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. My college experience (classes, competition team, internships, etc) has thankfully been more of the same.
> It wouldn't necessarily be explicit, but there were lots of offhand comments and jokes. That's how racism (and sexism, homophobia, ...) tends to present itself; it's a lot more subtle than people straight up going "I hate ${group}".
Don't conflate those jokes and offhand comments with hate. You're erasing all sorts of meaningful differences between basically harmless husbands joking about their wives or differences between men and women, and Andrew Tate.
It's also a poor tactic to effect change. If you immediately group basically harmless in-group type behaviours like these with actual devastating harm, you make yourself and your objections look silly causing people to dismiss you, and it's far harder to change behaviour after calling someone a hateful bigot, than it is to ask they tone it down because a joke made someone a little uncomfortable. I think you can easily imagine the difference in defensiveness each response might elicit.
Similarly, don't assume that all racism is expressed as hate. You're erasing all sorts of meaningful difficulties experienced by minorities if you assume that only overtly hateful comments can be disparaging.
> Similarly, don't assume that all racism is expressed as hate.
Who really claims that though? Saying "black people are always late" is racist because it's a racial prejudice, but that's not an expression of hatred towards black people. I think everyone gets that.
I also agree non-hateful comments can be insulting. So we're in agreement: erasing nuance is dumb. My point is that this nuance dictates that we shouldn't group these distinct behaviours all together and respond to them the same way.
> If you immediately group basically harmless in-group type behaviours like these with actual devastating harm, you make yourself and your objections look silly causing people to dismiss you, and it's far harder to change behaviour after calling someone a hateful bigot, than it is to ask they tone it down because a joke made someone a little uncomfortable.
Sure, some of those things can be harmless. I agree that when calling out bad behavior you shouldn't necessarily go all the way to 100 (ofc depending on severity). The main way to gauge malice is people's reactions to a reasonable request to tone it down. Apologizing and not repeating it? Cool, that's how basically any friend group figures out where the line is drawn. Doubling down and basically saying "grow a pair"? Not ok.
There's also a difference between something like "hah, guess they were on IST" vs "typical street shitter" (using my own ethnicity as an example).
The point is you don't know how this person walks or talks, you only see a fragment of a conversation typically taken out of context. I hope you see the problem here, to say nothing of the problem with assuming someone is intrinsically evil unless they toe your specific line.
Furthermore I'm entitled to argue for what I think are good practices for communicating online, just like everyone else.
If people making jokes is a problem for you, there is a really fucking simple solution: don't get offended. You aren't entitled to people going out of their way to accomodate you. If you don't know if someone is doing something out of hate, assume they are not.
Angsty teens trying to push the boundaries of what is socially acceptable are unfortunately heavily overrepresented in Internet culture, from what I've found.
A bit of pushback and people are usually super apologetic. Usually they're just aping someone else who said something counter-culture because they thought it sounded badass, and don't really believe it.
I feel that with gaming communities the main problem is simply having too many teenagers without supervision. It's pretty much like school really, immature people picking on others because of their own insecurity / problems. Eventually most people even in very toxic communities grow up and stop hating people for no logical reason, at least the smart ones.
It's not about telling people your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, it's about WHAT IS SAID about your ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.
The beauty of the internet is anonymity (to a certain extent), but that doesn't mean that you can't see or hear things that exclude you.
Exactly. The old saying was "The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog."
... except they didn't mean dog, and we never said why it might matter what you are or what other people were assuming you were absent further information.
I agree with the quote from the Wikipedia article:
Sociologist Sherry Turkle elaborates: "You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. They don't look at your body and make assumptions. They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words."
> The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog
That comic meant a lot to me. When I was growing up, I found that most adults would treat me with condescension. On the internet, I could engage in conversation as an equal. Anonymity didn't change the prejudices that people held, but it did change my experience.
I agree, and I had a similar formative experience. There's a great quote about being alive during the era of the moon landing that also resonates with me on this topic: "It was as if all of us, all over the world, had been given permission to dream big dreams."
I think it was a strict step forward over the previous status quo but (not unlike the changes to American culture after military necessity broke racial segregation barriers in the military during World War II) it's not the final step.
It's a placeholder because if the New Yorker had run a comic that said "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a black man," that wouldn't have been funny at all.
No, sorry, I was there. That's the key thing people need to remember about the Old Internet.
Some of IRC was extremely racist and sexist. Almost all of the rest was "regular" racist and sexist. It was pretty closely related to 4chan culture (under-moderated by outside forces that had little power to force any particular standards upon the moderators). The magic of the medium was that since everything was text, nobody knew you were the butt of the joke and you could pretend you weren't.
But go mask-off and admit you were a woman or a minority, and oh boy. Good luck with that. Good thing it's easy to change your handle, right?
There's a reason anonymity as a virtue grew in that space: it protected people from those who hadn't left their IRL baggage behind by letting people pretend to be the "default" (which was almost always white men).
We made a mistake believing the online space wasn't the real world. It was. It was just the real world where you could pretend to be something else. That was good at the time; it let more people participate by donning masks. But we should aim for better.
IRC isn’t a place, it’s a platform for speech for lots of diverse groups, some of which were/are racist. Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist.
... but it's also a true generalization, in the sense that if you throw a dart at a random IRC channel across all networks, you'll proabably hit one where the level of tolerated racism and sexism is at least "American standard."
> Saying IRC was/is racist is like saying the internet is racist
Saying we should aim for better sounds nice, but I fear that bias and prejudice based on things that shouldn't matter is an incurable part of human nature, and anonymity, and using text for everything, would be our best defense. I say "would be" because I doubt that I can convince a large enough percentage of people, including my own cofounder, to use anonymized text chat for important things like interviews and work conversations. Especially the "text chat" part since, at least for now, talking is still much faster and smoother for most of us than accurate text input. But I can dream.
The joke is even funnier if you're a furry, and the entire point of your online persona is people knowing you're a dog. (Even if your fursona actually is, say, a cat. The joke is enhanced.)
We focused on technical discussions on technical channels.
I’m sorry if you had a bad time on IRC, but as someone who cut their teeth on IRC in the early 90s, and got their career started through contacts made on IRC, what you describe couldn’t be further from the kind of technical communities I participated in.
> EDIT: In the below thread are many people who personally identify as omnipresent IRC Gods, so my experience must have happened in an alternate universe. My bad.
There can only be one omnipresent IRC God, and you're talking to them. You can wipe your ass with your experience for all they care.
I was only active on IRC in later years (early 2000's onwards) and there was definitely a lot of casual homophobia. Using 'gay' as a synonym for bad was extremely common, I picked it up as well. Calling someone a fag was done all the time as well, not even always as an insult.
I don't think the majority of people using the words were actually homophobic (I wasn't), just copying other people to "fit in" without even thinking of the possibility it was harming someone. I think it was early 2004-05 that someone private messaged me explaining that it sucks when people use the word that way and I stopped.
I don't recall much racism against black people, but I can totally see the N word being used casually in the same way in some other servers/channels.
I don't remember anyone trying to doxx anyone's race on freenode. Perhaps they're talking about USENET/IRC at large as opposed to the tech community which I believe were mostly on freenode (now libera).
Otherwise I can only assume that chats within all-chat appeared to be racist in nature but again, that's not something I've seen (especially unchallenged) in any of the freenode channels I frequented.
Nobody wanted to involve their personal lives or details until recently when identity and identifying became the thing.