Not really. Aside from the warez and books and a few tech channels, I found it really really difficult to make any meaningful connections or even have social co

Not really. Aside from the warez and books and a few tech channels, I found it really really difficult to make any meaningful connections or even have social conversations there. You go into one of the larger channels and its a hundred people spewing into the channel and its very difficult to even understand what threads are occurring or if they are just talking past each other, let alone actually get a conversation going. Then you go the smaller channels, and everyone is idling/afk. Then there were the very specific channels, and any talk of anything other than Pokeman in #pokeman will get you kicked. The tech channels were reasonably good, but it was mostly business there too. Occasionally you find a decent room with people talking and looking to just kind of shoot the shit, but I found more often than not, it was someone entirely across the globe- and while that is interesting in its own way, my jaw was on the floor when I first chatted with someone from Singapore in the 90s (long distance was dollars a minute then), I quickly realized that we really had almost no shared cultural context and after "so what is life like in $yourcountry" we didn't have much to talk about. I was op on a few tech channels on efnet back in the day, and learned some interesting things and gave (and received) a lot of good help, but as far as using it to just chat about the weather and meet people, I found it not very useful- especially compared to AOL chatrooms.