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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

Those are some rose tinted glasses you must be wearing. All these animated gifs and visitor counters were not here to convey valuable information but rather to make the website more popular.

If people back then could've played full screen interactive video on page load, they would have. Look at how popular Flash became.

I too still use IRC (although a lot less than I used to). I don't think it's really about interesting people vs. "pop culture" though, it's more of a generational thing. I'm sure today's relevant coders are more likely to be found on Discord than IRC.

That's quite unfortunate I might add, Discord is a bloated, centralized, closed source mess. But what can you do, it is shinier.

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> All these animated gifs and visitor counters were not here to convey valuable information but rather to make the website more popular.

One of my websites (for my first startup - an ISP) used a server side include that called out to ping the client IP to inline either a static image or one of several "big" - by 1997 standards - animated GIFs by guessing at the client bandwidth based on ping time (yes, it was a very rough heuristic, but it worked surprisingly well at the time), because we wanted to be able to serve up a fancy animated logo to those whose connection could handle it...

If we could have served up something fancier we certainly would have.

I don't know if you have tried using Discord for any signifiant amount of time, but I have and I didn't find it to be the expertise filled successor that I thought it would be. I've joined channels for programming languages and it's at best the blind leading the blind, like a Programming 101 class forum. At worst it's lots of people asking if they can ask, or if anybody knows the language, and then leaving forever before someone replies.

definitely depends on the server, I’ve had difficult time finding groups for certain lang’s. but Rust, React, TypeScript have super active great communities there

I think in general what’s difficult these days is bringing communities together - there’s too much noise and promotion, too many places for people to be. so you get the situation you mention above - a lot of unanswered questions in a discord server with a perpetual churn of users looking for a community that fits what they’re looking for.

feels like people are less willing to become a part of a community - forum, IRC, discord, whatever - these days either. but I have a feeling that’s because I’m more out of the loop... FB groups seem to constantly pop off

I think IRC still has in depth communication is due to the fact that there is a barrier to joining. All these apps are trying to be easy, without realizing there's sometimes something good with being hard.

Yeah IRC needs a few features discord has to get better. Problem is those few features require central hosting

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