From what Mozilla found, the opposite is true. It’s quite difficult to stop abuse, to the point where they ended their IRC network. It is, however, fabulously good at being a barrier to entry into any community that chooses to use it, and not in a good way. When the community locks itself away behind technical walls, we exclude people based mostly on current technical ability.
If you want to (constructively) participate in a technical community and are held off by a decades old chat protocol with literally hundreds of tutorials and step-by-step guides online, maybe this barrier of entry is exactly for your kind…
Despite the common opinion (mainly prevalent in IT), not everyone should be given an equal platform just because he has something to say. The opinion of a conspiracy nutjob on vaccines is not equal to that of an epidemiologist with a PhD, the opinion of a DIY tinkerer on wiring a house is not equal to that of a trained electrician, etc. For all those fields, gatekeepers are common and far greater than simply the ability to install a freaking IRC client.
The Mozilla case was a clear example of giving an “explanation” for something that upper management had decided for other reasons anyways.
They simply wanted to get rid off running their own infrastructure and having to actually moderate their own channels properly… hence they handed that off of EMS. I am sure originally they wanted to just use Slack (as they apparently do internally), but that would have been a PR disaster.
P.S.: I like Mozilla, but their upper management is complete crap.
From what Mozilla found, the opposite is true. It’s quite difficult to stop abuse, to the point where they ended their IRC network. It is, however, fabulously good at being a barrier to entry into any community that chooses to use it, and not in a good way. When the community locks itself away behind technical walls, we exclude people based mostly on current technical ability.
If you want to (constructively) participate in a technical community and are held off by a decades old chat protocol with literally hundreds of tutorials and step-by-step guides online, maybe this barrier of entry is exactly for your kind…
Despite the common opinion (mainly prevalent in IT), not everyone should be given an equal platform just because he has something to say. The opinion of a conspiracy nutjob on vaccines is not equal to that of an epidemiologist with a PhD, the opinion of a DIY tinkerer on wiring a house is not equal to that of a trained electrician, etc. For all those fields, gatekeepers are common and far greater than simply the ability to install a freaking IRC client.
The Mozilla case was a clear example of giving an “explanation” for something that upper management had decided for other reasons anyways.
They simply wanted to get rid off running their own infrastructure and having to actually moderate their own channels properly… hence they handed that off of EMS. I am sure originally they wanted to just use Slack (as they apparently do internally), but that would have been a PR disaster.
P.S.: I like Mozilla, but their upper management is complete crap.