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Comment by Vermyndax | Hacker News Reader

I have been wondering why Usenet and IRC haven't experienced a resurgence. Discord will be the next casualty of corporate greed. It's really a fallacy that these communities are moving to yet another corporate-controlled entity.

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Discord and Slack are just IRC with a bunch more features. The IRC protocol just stagnated and never improved (because it's a function of it's time). I believe there was talk of a new version with more features, but that honestly defeats the purpose of IRC: its simplicity. All of these modern protocols have more complexity built into them because that's what the average user expects.

But yeah, the fall of Discord is coming. The enshitification process has begun. Their forcing users to use unique usernames still baffles me.

Unfortunately, I think it's just because there is no single organization pushing it. One that would be the recognizable brand, one that would engage in marketing, and spend time and effort streamlining onboarding.

There were in the past - Slack basically bootstrapped itself off the back of techies, with the IRC transport making Slack seem like a prettier IRC... only to shut down the IRC transport once they've entrenched themselves on the market.

IRC has been heavily wounded by the Freenode implosion, which was for a while the last big public IRC network. I think a lot of types of people who would once have promoted IRC over Discord are now on Matrix instead as a result.

Usenet requires special software and often subscriptions, whereas Reddit doesn't.

Doesn't the usenet have a spam problem?

It did back in the 2000s when it was popular. But even then it wasn't hard to use clientside filters/killfiles to get rid of spam. 15 years of being dead have resulted in usenet having a pretty good signal to noise ratio. If it becomes popular enough to have that problem again I'll be happy.

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