When it started out,
AnotherNet was pretty cool, being a good
haven for
geeks and the like, and almost immediately became the new
home of
#trax and home of a much better version of
#coders.
Then it started to get popular, and shane got hubris. First he took all of simon's GPLed modifications to ircd and stole them, made them copyright to himself, and started charging huge license fees for it (and when Simon tried releasing them on his own, shane actually sued him for copyright infringement).
They also kept on getting more and more anal about being "family-safe" and the like, and rather than fixing security holes, they decided to k:line people after damage had been done. They also pandered to clueless whiners, actively punishing any users with any knowledge (the administration actively persecuted me because I knew a lot about the IRC protocol and was therefore a potential threat).
The last straw, however, was when they started to automatically k:line anyone who tried to /join any channel with the words sex, shit, fuck, or any other bad word in the channel name (woe if you want to go into #essex or #matsushita), they monitored all DCC requests to make sure people weren't spreading warez or porn in them and then eventually just started k:lining anyone who did any DCC (including DCC chat), and they basically turned it into a fascist state.
And yet I didn't leave even then, holding on to the potential of them seeing the error of their ways, but no, they continued to bite the hands of those who made their network so successful to begin with, and I got g:lined for speaking up against them (though the official explanation was that I was running a clonebot and harrassing users), not that I was ever going to go back anyway after that.