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I'm amused that IRC is the only one of those you listed that is still alive and doing well.
by craftyguy 9y ago
I'm amused that IRC is the only one of those you listed that is still alive and doing well.
- ekianjo 9y agoOpenness and standards matter in the end.
- craftyguy 9y agoI sure hope so!
- freeflight 9y agoAfaik ICQ is still somewhat popular in eastern Europe.
- thinkloop 9y agoI don't actually remember why ICQ died, it was the best then there was MSN Messenger for some reason...?
- dvanduzer 9y agoAOL bought them. Slow burn.
- SyneRyder 9y agoICQ is now owned by the Russian company behind Mail.RU. AOL sold it for $187.5 million, less than half what they paid for it: https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messaging-service-icq-to-dst-for-187-5-million/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/28/aol-sells-instant-messagin...
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y agoI think the main reason is because Windows XP included a basic MSN Messenger client enabled by default in 2001. Indeed, ICQ was vastly superior. In fact, in my opinion, many of its features (such as the discovery features) have not been equalled since them. It was quite traumatic to me when it was replaced with MSN Messenger.
- dec0dedab0de 9y agoin my circle of friends it was because aim let you pick a username instead of a number
- shagen 9y agoI remember that they bloated up their client so much with menu bars, icons and later ads that it was not snappy anymore and required a lot of memory. So people where looking for alternatives.
- Joeri 9y agoICQ’s find a friend feature got me into contact with someone in south africa (I’m from europe), who I ended up visiting for a month. It’s the sort of random encounter / friendship that you could have in the pre-2005 internet and that’s much harder today.
- yborg 9y agoIt's alive, but I don't know about 'doing well'. It survives among some special interest communities, but the usage is tiny compared to any of the major platforms now. You won't find your uncle on it.
- ryanplant-au 9y agoTo be fair, I wouldn't have found him on IRC in 1998 either. IRC has really always been a relatively niche thing and I think it's fair to say it's doing well if you define that as remaining popular within the niches it's always been associated with. Though I think this is starting to change with the popularity of Discord.
- verylittlemeat 9y agoYes Discord is starting to really starting to dominate. More and more often these days you'll find at the bottom of a community info page a discord rather than an IRC channel. Even big pirating communities are making the switch.
- rjbwork 9y agoHow does that work? I'm a regular in the C# Discord community and one of the rules we enforce and have to enforce regularly is no illegal or shifty activity (pirating, cracking, hacking, aimbots, cheating, etc.) because the discord admins don't take kindly to that sort of thing.
- TheSmiddy 9y agoWell there's obviously far too much conversation for the admins to actually snoop in on what everybody is saying so unless anybody in the group reports it then it would just fly under the radar.
- na85 9y ago>You won't find your uncle on it. Bug or feature?