IRC's influx of new users has been dropping off for a long time. Personally I started using IRC 20 years ago, there were a lot of new users then. The big IRCn

IRC's influx of new users has been dropping off for a long time. Personally I started using IRC 20 years ago, there were a lot of new users then. The big IRCnets were massive[a] compared to today[b]. Today libera.chat is the biggest, but slowly dropping. End result? IRC provides me direct access to a community that's ancient, with a notable lack of less experienced users. This is exceptionally helpful, I don't need a giant community to engage with, a few users with decades of experience in the topic I'm interested in is enough to answer almost all my questions :). As such I would be rather surprised if there was a better option for real time answers. I imagine usenet is a similar experience. An even older community with little influx of new users, ergo an even higher median experience level. I expect I'll use IRC until I die, I can't say that for many things in technology. [a] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2003 https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2003 [b] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php