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Comment by LudwigNagasena | Hacker News Reader

IRC has existed for over 30 years and was widely popular for the big part of that timespan. Yet no one ever made it into or extended it into a realistic competitor to the modern wall garden proprietary chat platforms.

Is there a fundamental issue with IRC that precludes that? Did no one just bother? Is it the specific mentality among its core users that "absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature" that lead to its demise?

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Money.

You can't make as much money with open protocols.

Worst of all, it's very hard to pitch such a business to people who would fund you, so your business is outcompeted very early on.

What users want and what entrepreneurs and investors want are two, largely uncorrelated, things.

IRC was never widely popular outside of a gamer/geek niche. At its peak, QuakeNet never broke 250,000 "users", many of which were bots.

You are so incredibly wrong about this, it saddens me.

If you're gonna tell someone they're wrong in such a dramatic way you need to explain why.

Even if his numbers are wrong, I'll never believe you that IRC was more used than say, AIM or ICQ, let alone any of the popular modern instant messenger and chat apps.

Ok, fine. But can we at least reverse the gamer/geek label. It was always a geek tool - gaming was far secondary. Look at bash.org and tell me the majority of IRC was used for gaming vs. geeking.

IRC usage stats are freely available. It was never popular.

https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2006

There's Pest [0], but I don't think it tries to be more usable, maybe even less so. I think it's hard to take old standards and put modern features on them; at some point it's more beneficial to just invent your own thing.

[0] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=4003#11-what-is-pest

looks like the guy who took over freenode is doing his best to create a walled garden. Also plenty of people still on IRC, including me :)

FWIW, I like irssi much better than the slack front end, but as font ends go, slack's is not terrible.

There's no business model in IRC, and thus no marketing money.

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