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> The biggest downside is that when you join a channel, you don't get to read all the previous history. In my use of it - primarily social, less technical - th
by vertex-four 12y ago
> The biggest downside is that when you join a channel, you don't get to read all the previous history.
In my use of it - primarily social, less technical - this is actually a huge benefit. Whereas things I say on Facebook, on Twitter, even on Skype groups float around forever, this doesn't happen on IRC.
Only the other people in the channel log things, and if someone else turns up, they don't see what I've been talking about - the exact contents of my discussions aren't floating about forever so long as people don't intentionally distribute them.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoThis is also one of the (original) benefits of 4chan. It's not merely anonymous, but it is also ephemeral. However, these days there are IRC loggers and 4chan archivers.
- vertex-four 12y agoThere's only IRC loggers that you can see, though - if you know (practically) everyone in a channel at a given point in time, you're reasonably safe - not 100%, but reasonably. Which is about good enough for most things.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoYou guys know that probably every third person on Freenode has his or her own IRC bot on the channel? ;). Ok, I'm exaggerating, but I'm yet to see a popular channel that isn't logged either publicly or privately.
- ashark 12y agoIRC's one of the only things that makes me feel like the early web did. A bunch of mostly-anonymous people collaborating or just hanging out, and it doesn't seem like everyone's trying to make a buck or polish their "personal brand". Little or no official corporate presence. No one's worried anything they write will ruin their lives, justly or unjustly. It's the "no one knows you're a dog" web of yesteryear. I miss when more of the web was like that. It's nice.
- mongol 12y agoWell put. It is quite different now.
- yborg 12y agoMost channel bots log, and most channels have bots to provide application services (like history searching). I have 5 continuous years of history for some of the channel bots I run. There used to be a bot that would try and join every public channel and produced a web-searchable archive of transcripts, I don't know if this is still running.
- vertex-four 12y agoMost channels I'm in don't have channel bots - one XKCD-related subchannel does (and it doesn't log), and the local hackspace's does (and it doesn't log either), but I'm in another half a dozen channels that don't.