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Comment by mezod | Hacker News Reader

IRC is the epitome of the internet. Only downhill from those times. :/

I think to anyone who has used it, it is plain testament that social networks do not scale. This is a social limitation, not a technical one. What killed the Internet is the centralization of platforms compounded by the commercial interest to "engage" on behalf of both corporations and users. IRC worked because it was decentralized and had no commercial interest, nor did it cater to narcissistic tendencies. No interest to comment for points, and decentralized enforcement where you'd fuck around and simply get banned from the(that) server.

I once read an article about forum quality as a function of the number of users. I can't seem to find it anymore, sadly.

The core idea is there's an optimal number of people. Not enough people and the community dies: not enough activity and ideas to sustain it. Too many and it also dies: it becomes impossible to form social relationships, cooperation dies down, everything becomes meaningless because you don't know anyone, the probability of ever interacting with any given person ever again trends toward zero.

Made a lot of sense to me.

would be nice to find it :P

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Curious to know what that article was. Was it an actual study or just some random post?

I had a _really_ in-depth conversation with a friend with multiple interesting lines of thought going at once that only worked because the chat we were using had a per-message reply feature. The conversation would not have been as meaningful to me otherwise. I'm not sure IRC could have supported a chat like that...

(admittedly I haven't tried anything other than a few basic IRC chats, never really getting deep into IRCv3 or new features and stuff)

I can appreciate that per message replies are handy in modern messages. But if you were having _such_ an in-depth conversation at the peak of IRC, you may have moved to email to make it async and allow for more fully thought-out replies.

Email is still a great way to communicate with people today.

Or Usenet.

In IRC you'd just paste the relevant message or part of a message you're replying to after a greater than sign and then post your thought in the following message. Works totally fine. I have used IRC, XMPP, and Matrix to chat with some of the same close friends, I don't find actual replies to be necessary, and I think they kinda disrupt the flow when used too much.

Some discord/slack spaces have kinda same feel.

Those are centralized and apparently the former at least now requires phone verification. Not even close.

IRC is still there, we just have less time and new kids have new places to talk.

yeh, but not really... just channels with idlers and bncs

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