Will OremusAnyone who's spent time in smaller online forums has met a mod like Musk. You can tell it's gonna be a disaster from the moment they take over. Using their mod powers to settle personal scores, making up new rules to justify them, apologizing and reversing course, taking polls, offering to step down and then not doing it...
Rachel Metz@willoremus it's like a weird/sad bullying situation playing out on a global platform. but also... as @johnlehet points out, i, too have *never* seen anything like this in my decades spent online. maybe that's why the destruction of twitter feels so sad and personal.
Alistair Buxton@rachelmetz @willoremus @johnlehet
Andrew Lee, millionaire tech entrepreneur and free speech absolutist, took control of Freenode, an IRC network with 90k active users, in May 2021. He completely destroyed it in just six weeks with policies identical to Musk's.
All the existing staff immediately quit to start a new network, so Lee banned anyone talking about that new network.
The only one of Lee's mistakes that Musk hasn't yet made is accidentally deleting the user database.
@rachelmetz @willoremus @johnlehet
Like Musk, Lee's free speech policies were at first cautiously welcomed by some users. But also like Musk, even those users quickly turned against him as his rules became increasingly arbitrary and hypocritical.
@rachelmetz @willoremus @johnlehet
Some more things Musk and Lee both did:
* Bringing in their own team of sycophants to take over.
* Those teams accidentally breaking login services multiple times.
* Privately begging for help while publicly attacking the same people.
* Banning mention of *any* competing platform.
* Banning well-known users for spurious reasons.
* Unbanning well-known racists and trolls, and giving them elevated mod privileges.
* Driving away sponsors.
@rachelmetz @willoremus @johnlehet
They are also very similar in personality:
* Spending 90% of their day trolling people on the platform.
* Daily repeating qanon/gr/anti-vax/woke/cancel culture/other conspiracy theories.
* Claiming to be "neither left nor right" while explicitly supporting the most extreme wing of the GOP.
* Workplace harassment lawsuits from ex-staff of their other companies.
@rachelmetz @willoremus @johnlehet
In the end, the only part of Freenode that Lee owned was the domain name and trademark, and today that is all that is left of it. Everyone moved to libera.chat, run by the old staff on the old donated servers, and you can't tell the difference.
Andrew Lee also claims to be the rightful heir to the throne of a unified Korea. At the time I thought he was an Elon Musk wannabee, but now I realise Musk is just a richer version of the same character.