They wielded the ban hammer before anyone knew what digital burnout meant. An investigation into how running IRC channels in the '90s created the first generation of chronically online moderators — and why nobody prepared them for the psychological toll.
Mar 17, 2026
While Napster burned and BitTorrent bent the knee to copyright lawyers, XDCC bots quietly kept serving gigabytes of questionable content to anyone who knew the magic words. Here's how IRC's gray-market file distribution became the cockroach of the internet.
Mar 17, 2026