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Then presumably you never did work over IRC. The fact that you can have discussions in asynchronous real time out in the open makes (made?) for a far superior d

Then presumably you never did work over IRC. The fact that you can have discussions in asynchronous real time out in the open makes (made?) for a far superior developer experience compared to forums, text messages, emails, and everything in between, because everyone could _passively_ follow the conversations that were happening. IRC is the ship's "always on" walkie talkie: do you need it? No. Does it provide a layer of common knowledge that you never even stopped to think about made everyone feel like they knew what was going on even when they couldn't tell you what was going on, thus making everything run impressively smoothly? Absolutely. And remember that IRC has been around since 1995, when the idea of separate protocols to do different things was common place. IRC has been dying a very, very slow death. (and despite nostalgia: IRC was never big. Even the largest of IRC servers only had around a hundred thousand users. That might sound like a lot, but we're talking globally: the most popular IRC server had a fraction of the users that CompuServe did, and CompuServe was decidedly worse at being a chat system, even though that was the main reason you'd use it)

mirkules 8y ago
I was never an IRC user, mainly because I never really needed it. Everyone I wanted to talk to back in the day was on BBSes, later ICQ and later still AIM, and IRC just always seemed so desolate and took a lot of investigative work to find the right channel to find something interesting. I'm not really defending IRC, more than questioning the need for yet another chat application, with a distinct con of being centralized when we have all these other means of accomplishing the same thing
- TheRealPomax 8y ago
  Right, and as someone who's used it extensively, I'm here to tell you that its value is not in being "a chat application". Its value is in being a _community_ platform, where everyone can see and hear everyone else. While private message has always been in the spec, the value of IRC has always been in offering people a place to establish common knowledge and culture _passively_ to whatever degree necessary for the channel or even server that happened in/on. Simply by being in an IRC channel you become part of that, which is radically different from any of the other media you mention, where one has to actively go through the records (as it were) to get an idea of what's going on, and what the shared culture and body of knowledge is. They really are very different media with a very different experience, and today the only experience that has managed to recreate the value that set IRC apart from other communication tools is Slack/Discord.
NikkiA 8y ago
> 1995 Minor nitpick: 1988 to 1993, depending on what you consider 'irc'. (1988 for irc1, 1993 for the standardization of ircII that still defines irc today, 1992 if you consider the efnet/undernet fork to be the birth of true irc).

mirkules 8y ago

I was never an IRC user, mainly because I never really needed it. Everyone I wanted to talk to back in the day was on BBSes, later ICQ and later still AIM, and IRC just always seemed so desolate and took a lot of investigative work to find the right channel to find something interesting. I'm not really defending IRC, more than questioning the need for yet another chat application, with a distinct con of being centralized when we have all these other means of accomplishing the same thing

TheRealPomax 8y ago
Right, and as someone who's used it extensively, I'm here to tell you that its value is not in being "a chat application". Its value is in being a _community_ platform, where everyone can see and hear everyone else. While private message has always been in the spec, the value of IRC has always been in offering people a place to establish common knowledge and culture _passively_ to whatever degree necessary for the channel or even server that happened in/on. Simply by being in an IRC channel you become part of that, which is radically different from any of the other media you mention, where one has to actively go through the records (as it were) to get an idea of what's going on, and what the shared culture and body of knowledge is. They really are very different media with a very different experience, and today the only experience that has managed to recreate the value that set IRC apart from other communication tools is Slack/Discord.

NikkiA 8y ago

> 1995 Minor nitpick: 1988 to 1993, depending on what you consider 'irc'. (1988 for irc1, 1993 for the standardization of ircII that still defines irc today, 1992 if you consider the efnet/undernet fork to be the birth of true irc).