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Comment by jaabe | Hacker News Reader

I miss IRC, for a lot of the same reasons the author misses Facebook. Being above 35 like the author, I think it’s more the fact that people just aren’t chatty anymore. It’s anecdotal of course, but if I look at myself, I’m really not that chatty anymore either. I too used to have late night chats about random stupid things, but right now, I can even remember when I last saw 3AM unless it was to feed a baby or clean up after a sick child.

So when I say I miss IRC, it’s probably more true to say that I miss the freedom that comes with having almost no responsibilities. Maybe I should work on making more of my time, mine though.

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As a twenty year old, the problem is not that people aren’t chatty; it’s that the people you interact with aren’t chatty. For any niche topic you can find a Discord server or a Telegram channel or a Signal group chat or a Slack server or a whatever, where people are chatting about it 24/7. It’s the same model as IRC, although it is unfortunately now siloed.

How was IRC not siloed when you've always had different networks managed by different people?

It's the amount of silos. There was never more than a single digit number of IRC networks that anyone actually cared about. And even if you did need to be connected to a lot of them, you could do it all from the same client.

It’s siloed by technology now when it wasn’t before - you could connect to any irc server with one client but you need a different client for each network now.

I think it's just that those kinds of conversations and communities are migrating. I find that a lot of Discord servers are a throwback to the old IRC days. Just remember that the nostalgia factor might be clouding you to remember how toxic and time consuming it can get sometimes.

I am in the exact same spot. Whenever I do get the chance to go back to gaming/IRC I tend to feel quite bad about it (it's strongly affiliated with being lonely). So what to do now, it doesn't make it easier that the amount of freedom without responsibilities is quite low and tend to show up spontaneously. As it should be when you have kids.

It's painful to let go of those memories and accept that life has probably changed permanently, and with that what kind of activity that fits best.

I still use IRC. People are still plenty chatty.

Idem. I don't miss IRC because I'm still on IRC and it's still the same as always.

are you saying there's a market for Augmented Baby attending ?

I agree with your point about age, that said IRC is still pretty much the same, and even if you don't live in it as passionately as you (we) did before, it's still ~the highest signal/noise system out there.

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