I've been on IRC for a similar amount of time, sexual harassment was always done in private so you wouldn't have seen it on main rooms, and victims were often newbies who didn't know reporting channels or didn't feel empowered to report, being the noobs and all. (Think randomly PMing women to ask for feet/boob pictures, or asking to be PMd to help debug something and then use it as an opportunity to pressure for sext)

I used to be part of multiple IRC channels that swear up and down that they're not a bigoted/political community they're just a focused technical chat about .NET or something, and then spout off calling things "faggotry" every day with no self-awareness whatsoever.

If one wanted to substantiate some of your claims here to be convinced of the problem you suggest, what's the best way to do that?

What are the names of the IRC channels you were part of that said they weren't bigoted but used homophobic slurs every day?

I'm just responding to one flimsy anecdote with my own flimsy anecdote. You can believe me or not. But I would suggest you ask yourself why you responded to me with this and not the guy I responded to, who also didn't provide evidence where they were.

Just for other people's benefit: this comment is an excellent example of the kind of harassment women and others face online. When they try to relate their lived experiences, they are questioned relentlessly and asked for proof of things that obviously cannot be proven in a conclusive manner. (And if any proof is given, the goalposts are typically moved.)

If your first response to someone saying "I was harassed" is "I need objective evidence before I believe that this could possibly have happened", you're part of the problem.

4 things (for other people's benefit):

1. This person didn't claim THEY were harassed. They claimed others were harassed. This was not THEIR lived experience. They were talking about harassment secondhand.

2. The secondhand claims of inappropriate language were made on the internet. The internet is different than the physical world. Much text typed on the internet is/can be recorded. It is a very common practice for someone who is being harassed on the internet to share with others the record of their harassment. The internet is perfect for this. It's certainly much messier out in the physical world to prove which is the analogy you seem to be trying to apply to internet communication.

3. I just asked WHERE it happened, not to provide a precise record of the claims. It wasn't a tall ask to respond with an internet location (i.e. channel).

4. Questioning claims is NOT harassment, especially when the cost to produce evidence supporting the claim approaches zero (as on the internet). This is a toxic mentality to employ, though I'm sure you think you are being noble with your #believeallclaims approach. If anything, people who employ a "DON'T QUESTION IT!" approach do themselves a huge disservice, as that is probably the least persuasive tactic to do and immediately signals a huge red flag to any neutral onlookers.

The topic here is asking for where secondhand claims of harassment on a part of the internet happened, with the context of it being contrary to MY lived experience in similar parts of the internet. I'm trying to square how this secondhand claim could be contradictory to MY lived experience, and to update my understanding if given new information.

As a last rhetorical example/hypothetical: Let's say I made a claim that someone replied to a tweet of mine this week calling me the n-word. Do you automatically believe me? If you sought to prove my claim by looking at my tweets, are you a racist that is harassing me? What if there is absolutely no record of the alleged tweet reply happening/existing (even accounting for a potential delete)? Would you ever waver in your belief of my claim?

Sure, I am being hyperbolic and should not be when presenting my perspective. Use the word rampant was misleading.

My point is that people hail these communities as the golden child of diversity in a community, but back in the late 90s and early 00s internet nerd culture was anything but diverse. Again, I am not saying diversity did not exist, but if you were to measure the amount of say.. white males vs other groups on IRC we all know which way it skews.

My other point was that, back then it was common in internet culture to throw offensive, racist, and sexist terms/jokes back-and-forth with no recourse as a form of trolling. The people using these terms may not even be racist/sexist, but from the perspective of a minority there is no difference.

I enjoyed being on IRC, to the point where most of my free time was spent gaming but then shifted to just chatting with folks on IRC. It was great. I miss it dearly. But I do not see it as some diversity golden child we should all aspire to.