I participated (mostly lurked) on the -offtopic of a niche IRC channel which had developed the most fascinating culture I have ever encountered anywhere, on the Internet or in person. This channel had developed a governance model based heavily on English Socialism (as seen in Orwell's <i>1984</i>). Over time, a hundred-some-odd-section rulebook had been formed, with rules ranging from "no nick-spam" to "UTF-8 is the one true encoding" to "all rules currently in effect have always been in effect;" this last in particular resulted in people suddenly not talking about any past violations of a rule after the rule was put into place.<p>A dystopian chatroom is an extraordinarily odd place.