ngl the implication that something happened in the world of irc that turned it from this apolitical, progressive utopia to a jew-joke, rape-joke, -ism-everywhere cesspool is fascinating and please tell me more about it, not sarcastic
IRC back in those days was more oriented towards central/northern european university students...specifically nerds. In the 90s, they mostly would have been talking about lan parties, actual parties, drinking, drugs, software/media piracy, etc.
As we did.
I don't know how much of a cesspool it would have been back then as IRCOps back in that day were famously proactive, thin-skinned and intolerant of divisive bullshit. Generally trolls were k-lined quickly. Especially because operating a server then was an individual's labour of love and not using large, corporate resources. Server operators had to keep trash off their server in order to stay in their network. Individual servers could only handle _hundreds_ of connected users.
It was neither utopian, nor progressive. It was ruthless, impersonal and dog-eat-dog.
The shift towards what it is now was that the resources to operate a network became absurdly cheap and caring about who was on your network and doing what went completely out the window.
