I agree with the sediment based on my experience. One work around I found was to have multiple identities on the IRC server since everyone's IP's were cloaked anyway.
I had a a persona for socializing, one for NetAdmin and one for the "sysadmin in the background", at times even arguing with my self out loud just for fun. I suppose that is self deprecating but it kept the social version of me out of the administration dynamics. Each persona has to use a different writing style and that was super easy barely an inconvenience as the NetAdmin is very terse, to the point and the Sysadmin just gets things done. Not that all this really mattered, as I am very anti-censorship. I only kicked or gzlined the most abusive people and servers.
Bit of a niche comparison, but I think this is what has kept the long-running /tg/station13 project (major branch of the open source video game Space Station 13) going. The administrator who owns the servers rarely interacts with the community or his own coders, and basically only maintains completely uncontroversial and mission-critical components of the project (like devops stuff). This of course keeps the drama within the community insulated from the running of the servers themselves.
As a long time IRC user being an oper is the uber status symbol: this is what you want. I suppose it’s not PC to tell
people to fuck off and ban them but that’s exactly how you dealt with whiners “in the day”.
This is how you end up doxed, hacked, SWATed and with fake blogs created in your name advocating legalisation of pedophilia and whatnot.
It's better to just not. If you spend any amount of time running IRC networks you will soon discover that there are plenty of people who see this as a game, you're probably not up to play.
Nobody cares about who you are. You are nothing but an extremely sad irrelevant person that considers being on irc for 29 years some sort of an achievement.
I had a a persona for socializing, one for NetAdmin and one for the "sysadmin in the background", at times even arguing with my self out loud just for fun. I suppose that is self deprecating but it kept the social version of me out of the administration dynamics. Each persona has to use a different writing style and that was super easy barely an inconvenience as the NetAdmin is very terse, to the point and the Sysadmin just gets things done. Not that all this really mattered, as I am very anti-censorship. I only kicked or gzlined the most abusive people and servers.