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Comment by flxy | Hacker News Reader

As a techy person in their mid twenties, I've used irc extensively over the years and I miss it quite a bit. It doesn't have all the fancy features of modern messaging solutions because it was focused on the thing that actually mattered: conversations with others. These days when I look at the discord servers I'm in, a lot of it is just sharing images, spamming emotes and other silly things. Actual conversations are fairly rare. We had used irc at work as well for internal chatting. But after a while we switched to a paid, proprietary solution and the experience with that was honestly a lot worse. It seemed more businessy and that had an effect on how people used the service as well. There was a lot of informal, fun talk on irc but it turned fairly serious when we switched. I kind of hope that irc will somehow see a resurrection of sorts. It's not dead, but it's slowly fading for sure.

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> Actual conversations are fairly rare.

FWIW this is exactly my experience with pretty much every single IRC server and channel i've been the last 15 years or so. It used to be more... chatty before that, but over time people just join and idle.

I wonder if the ability to have IRCs running all the time actually harmed IRC since at the past (90s mainly and perhaps very early 2000s) if someone was in a channel, they'd be up for chatting too whereas now channels are full of "zombies".

Or it might just be a coincidence.

It started out as a necessity, and it isn't new. Its because of netsplits, DoS, and channel takeovers that bots existed on EFnet and IRCnet. Chanserv/Nickserv/X/W (and UnderNet/DALnet) came later on.

> I wonder if the ability to have IRCs running all the time actually harmed IRC since at the past (90s mainly and perhaps very early 2000s) if someone was in a channel, they'd be up for chatting too whereas now channels are full of "zombies".

Untrue; bots existed in past. Take a look at Eggdrop's age, for example. Whether it is much more common nowadays I don't know, but BNCs are nothing new either. If anything, it is because running a computer 24/7 is much more cheaper nowadays (although back then you could get a shell for e.g. 5-10 USD / month).

Well it isn't just nowadays, as i said it was like that from the early 2000s - at least in my experience. But then it might just be coincidence with the IRC becoming less popular in general.

There’s an irony / dilemma to point out here in the contrast between “spamming emotes” and “fairly serious”: both of these are a success, in a certain view.

The non-work Discord you describe now resembles how actual social interactions and friendship often work these days: mostly irrelevant interactions by volume, with a low incidence of significant conversation surrounded mostly by a lot of brief flashes of emotion shared haphazardly without much weight behind them.

The work Slack-ish you describe now resembles a professional environment, focused more effectively on doing work and less on watercooler chat.

I think that the chat platforms selected in each case are exaggerating how we behave in each situation, and that’s not necessarily a positive or negative.

IRC is wildly unproductive without extraordinarily high levels of effort invested in keeping it under control. Slack-ish work chats are wildly productive without a conscious effort to drag some degree of personal interaction into the workplace to replace what’s drained away when leaving IRC.

Is IRC truly the only way to return a bit of social coexistence to a workplace, or has culture changed in a more significant way that just happens to be reflected through the lens of chat systems?

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