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Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

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Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#42

Post by ionwake »

stevehawk wrote: post #23

I don't miss IRC, since I still use it, but I miss certain channels. I swear every linux related channel I go into is full of a bunch of a-holes. 20 years ago I got a lot of help (and I hope provided a lot of assistance myself) in #linux and others, but now it feels like I'm offending a channel when asking for help.

yeah I joined the bitcoin channel and asked something and I started getting really hostile treatment, I received the explanation that alot of new bad characters had joined recently and were causing trouble. i dont know but yes the positive vibe has gone a bit.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#43

Post by betamaxthetape »

I was born at the tail-end of the 90s, so never experienced the original 90s IRC "vibe".

However, I'm part of ArchiveTeam, and we use IRC pretty much exclusively for all our projects. Sure, we have a wiki for permanent notes, but all of the discussion, decisions, etc.. happen over on IRC.

Right now quite a few of the channels used by ArchiveTeam are migrating away from EFNet to hackint, due to connection issues with EFNet. Although migration to a different communication platform was brought up, it was almost immediately discounted.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#44

Post by inthreedee »

If you miss the vibe of a small community of mostly intelligent, supportive beings, you might find some of that in the tildeverse.

It's a "loose association of like-minded tilde communities", which exist on shared *nix systems, usually glued together with an IRC network. As an example, tilde.team is "a shared system that provides an inclusive, non-commercial space for teaching, learning, practicing and enjoying the social medium of unix."

Some tildes have specific focuses like gopher or writing science fiction. I've found the community to be mostly positive and accepting and it definitely has some of that ~Olde Internet~ vibe for me. I sometimes worry about the community growing too large and losing some of that, so maybe I should be keeping my mouth shut? Then again, share the love right? It is that certain day, after all. Here's a list of the member tildes: https://tildeverse.org/members/

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#45

Post by drivingmenuts »

Not particularly, but I’m also not enamored of Slack, either. IRC had easy discoverability that was free for the joining, whereas Slack has a better look and feel and no entire afternoons of channel greetings with nothing accomplished.

Neither one is a strong improvement over the other.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#46

Post by superkuh »

How can I miss it? I'm still on IRC all day every day. There are amazing little communities out there. You can use netsplit.de to find some of them. And of course there are the larger communities that sort of exist like all the people on Freenode that crossover on many channels.

IRC is very much alive and well. It's just that it didn't grow as fast as all the commercial web.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#48

Post by zzo38computer »

I still use IRC (and NNTP, which I actually only started using it recently). Unfortunately, many people don't use it, but some people do. Please continue to use IRC and NNTP and plain text and so on, which are better than Discord.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#49

Post by taway555 »

I do, but more so the era in which I heavily used it. I started a local IRC channel for my high school. Word spread and eventually we had 100-200 people on it every single night, which was a non trivial % population of the entire school. Not just nerds... everyone from all groups was on it. People are school were asking the more tech friendly folks: "How do I get mIRC on my computer??"

There were so many people on it that there was a legit problem identifying who was who (i.e. nicknames != real names). I eventually made a page linking IRC nicknames to profiles.

Looking back on it now, if I had had more vision, in a parallel universe, I would have replicated this experience to other areas schools in the region.. then state, then country then....?

Oh well :)

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