Comment by ytjohn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ytjohn | Hacker News Reader

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I remember IRC a bit differently - mostly with it being tied to dialup. When we were on irc, we were on. We might be "afk" for a bit, but generally would be back soon. If you saw someone's nick on irc, it was very likely that they were online and active. Even with ICQ and AOL, it was pretty apparent if people were online or not. If they weren't online, or you didn't need a quick response you sent them an email.

As DSL and broadband became more popular, chat moved to being more asynchronous. Chat clients started synchronizing message history with the server to make it avaialble on all your devices. It was easier to leave your presence online, even when you were unreachable.

IRC itself still retains a lot of that realtime chat, mainly because of its transient nature. Yes - the channel might be populated with people that aren't actually there, but the conversation is much more real time. Unless you have a bouncer or web client, the chat history starts when you join the channel and ends when you leave. There's no threading (ok, maybe some of the web-based clients will do that), so even if you see a conversation from a few hours ago, you can't participate in it. At best you can start a new conversation referencing the old one. Not everyone in the channel will have that history.

I consider that lack of permanence a feature. When Google Talk came out, I loved the fact that all my chat history was saved and it was available everywhere. Now that all chat clients have that, I find myself preferring the more ephemeral/transient chats.

I wholeheartedly agree here. In addition, IRC seemed more like a reflection of real life given the "synchronous design". Such as:

> so even if you see a conversation from a few hours ago, you can't participate in it.

Mirrored the limitations one would have in-person (i.e., they might have heard about the conversation, but now cannot participate in it, notably because it already occurred and all the same people may not be available -- you would have to start anew!)

Another interesting component of IRC is the explicit nature of people joining a channel -- it was treated the same way someone walked into a physical room; People would greet them and numerous conversations would naturally begin just by the essence of that presence. This is all mostly lost in modern clients.

I'm not sure why it's relevant to mirror life before always-on internet? It's not like I refuse to read books because my distant ancestors would sit around the fire and talk instead of reading.

Though I understand (but do not share) your desire for truly real-time, ephemeral conversation and IRC is one of the last remaining experiences with that ephemerality.

For the simple reason that humanity has evolved over thousands of years to consume and spread knowledge via the same tried-and-true methods.

They're commonplace online because they work.

When in 20 years, humans are literally beaming terabytes of data straight into their brains every hour, I'll still occasionally enjoy some "slow", yet rich in nuance, communications.

Have they? I mean humans spent most of their anthropological existence doing none of the sort. Moreover norms over how people conversed, when they conversed, and how openly they conversed widely varied based on culture, social standing, and gender. In many societies women weren't allowed to talk to many other people.

It's fine to prefer the ephemeral communication of IRC I'm just not sure if appealing to history is a good justification.

In my experience, for communication with people (including myself) using dialup or intermittently connected in some other way, the on-/offline indicator on ICQ was a killer feature, an indication of availability and responsiveness that required no effort to maintain, and I have not seen it usefully reproduced in the always-connected broadband world. Of course, various third-party clients providing “stealth mode” were abundant, so it’s not like this mode delivered everything people wanted out of the box, either. (It might be that the actual important difference was that you used ICQ for casual conversation only, and adding an acquaintance to your contact list was not a given or socially expected; not an implementation or UI issue as such.)

from the POV of people using irc from dialup it was indeed very much like that - but also from those who were dialing up to unix systems, or using them locally over a network such as at a university, the machine running the irc client maintained a persistent network connection so it was possible to run a persistent client (or eggdrop bot) without disconnecting/reconnecting and re-entering channels.

after about the year 2000 or so it was also really common to see people with shell accounts various places using gnu screen to maintain a persistent irc client session.

When I think about IRC, I remember everyone and their mom had a bouncer.

IRC fans will rewrite history to frame every flaw in the protocol as a feature.

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