Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 19:52:49 -0500 From: Rich Lafferty To: [irchelp mailinglist] Subject: Re: virtual channels Message-ID: <20001116195249.A1275@alcor.concordia.ca> On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 01:44:34AM -0600, sprite wrote: > > Well, I had a go at the idea of 'virtual channels with another oper, the > other night. > > The theory is interesting... if you are in a channel, and someone takes it > over, or you lose ops, you simply start a new instance of the channel, > move your bots (if any) and friends who want to follow you, and set up > shop on the next face/instance/page/view of the same channelname. [snip more] You know, I really wasn't planning on getting into this conversation at all, but I'll throw in a couple of cents, and those who *do* want to get into this conversation are welcome to use them, repeat them, deride them, or ignore them. I expect I'll drop right back out of the thread after I hit 'send'. One thing I see in all of the discussions over how to fix IRC is a tendency to put the cart before the horse -- to come up with technical solutions (a domain that hackers* are comfortable within) without identifying the social problems that are implicitly being addressed. So, putting on my sociologist fez: The problem that channel-instances addresses is takeovers. Takeovers are bad because people feel that something they had a right to, or at least that they enjoyed having, was illegitimately taken away. Now, this is interesting, because it's the equivalent of saying that the original inhabitants of a taken-over channel felt that the channel was their property. From what I know of DALnet -- admittedly, little -- there exists there the concept of the "owner" of a channel, and technical solutions which allow the owner to exercise the usual set of Western property rights over his property: inclusion, exclusion, and absolute rule. Same thing you get when you have a house. You get to decide who goes in and out, and no-one can take it to a higher court. In other words, DALnet has the concept of title (that a channel is "owned") and right (that the title legitimately confers power upon certain people). Now, since IRCnet implemented them, I've always found modeless channels to be intriguing. Modeless channels can't be taken over, because there's nothing to take. In other words, there's no right involved. But not only is there no right, there's no title either; any concept of "ownership" of a modeless channel could only be in that channel's own history, and even then it's more of a foundership -- because there's nothing at any moment to suggest who *currently* possesses the channel. Where DALnet-style owned channels have as a physical analogy a house, modeless channels are analogous to a park; one can certainly make it apparent that a particular area of the park is being used for a particular function, but the park never becomes *property*. And then there's EFnet, on which there are *some* means of exercising rights to a channel, but no concept of title. Since there's no concept of title, the rights don't extend far enough to protect the channel as property. But users see some rights, and that channel ops have power and are distinguished from non-ops as having power over what goes on in the space. Users *assume* that they have title *because* they have the means to assert it, and when it becomes apparent that the means do not extend far enough, they get upset. This reminds me of squatters -- otherwise-homeless people that occupy abandoned buildings -- in that when squatters are evicted, either by the owner of the building (where the analogy fails, but bear with me), the police, the neighbours, or other squatters (!), they bear a similar anger about being evicted from a place that was de facto, if not de jure, theirs. The problem of takeovers is rooted in that contradiction, and the contradiction cannot be resolved by technical means, because it is not a technical problem in the first place, but rather a social and political one. IRC with modeful channels but without channel ownership misleads users because it doesn't fit with the Western habitation and property models which are the only ones they know. I don't expect that EFnet will change policy to resolve the contradiction, but I also don't expect the takeover problem to be resolved until the contradiction is resolved. Were it up to me, I'd head towards modeless channels combined with more effective server-based and client-based /ignore-like functions, but not because I feel it would be any more effective than handing out channels like parcels of land; it *does* parallel other Internet spaces (in particular, Usenet), but I'm not certain if that's an advantage or not. -Rich * No, not 'crackers'. Sheesh. -- ------------------------------ Rich Lafferty --------------------------- Sysadmin/Programmer, Instructional and Information Technology Services Concordia University, Montreal, QC (514) 848-7625 ------------------------- rich@alcor.concordia.ca ----------------------