> We want to go back to the Internet of thick-skinned people who rarely even blocked others, much less actively tried to get them banned.
IRC had channel-wide, server-wide blocks available since the olden days, as well as user-to-user blocking. The term "flamewar" is old school from these days where people got hella banned. Forums had trolls that were banned and re-banned, see: the age of the term "sockpuppet".
If anything discord is way more open than IRC in that respect. In IRC you can own a channel and ban anyone who comes from another channel you dislike. You cannot pre-emptively ban all members of another server from your discord server.
> IRC had channel-wide, server-wide blocks available since the olden days, as well as user-to-user blocking. The term "flamewar" is old school from these days where people got hella banned. Forums had trolls that were banned and re-banned, see: the age of the term "sockpuppet".
And you had to really work to get a ban in most forums and IRC channels. You had to really step out of line - and continue stepping out of line.
Cast even a momentary glance at the things people get banned for on Reddit, or used to be banned for on Twitter.
A woman declaring, "Men are not women." is enough to have her Twitter account permanently deactivated. Try telling me that's even remotely close to how things were in the 1990s Internet.
> And you had to really work to get a ban in most forums and IRC channels. You had to really step out of line - and continue stepping out of line.
I disagree with this. It was easy to get kicked out of a channel for just being kinda annoying, and then if the mods just didn't like you they can just ban you. Also, like I said, it was normal to channel-ban (i.e. pre-emptively prevent any members from a channel to join yours) notorious channels.
Also yeah I would also kick people talking about "men are not women" just for being off-topic in my channel, which was about computer builds lol. If someone got kicked for being off-topic and came back and continued to be that way they got a ban for being annoying. It was super common to just ban vaguely annoying people.
IRC had channel-wide, server-wide blocks available since the olden days, as well as user-to-user blocking. The term "flamewar" is old school from these days where people got hella banned. Forums had trolls that were banned and re-banned, see: the age of the term "sockpuppet".
If anything discord is way more open than IRC in that respect. In IRC you can own a channel and ban anyone who comes from another channel you dislike. You cannot pre-emptively ban all members of another server from your discord server.