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IRC is dead, long live IRC

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Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#21

Post by rgbrenner »

zalew wrote: post #13
kybernetyk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's new tech startups are run by people who missed the time window when IRC was popular. They grew up with web based chats and instant messengers.

yep. for some context: One of the first times Zuckerberg and I (Mark Andreessen) got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?” http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1

Andreessen: One of the first times Zuckerberg and I got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?” And I said, “What do you mean, what did Netscape do?” And he was like, “Dude, I was in junior high. I wasn’t paying attention.

I have a hard time believing that. Zuckerberg is 6 months younger than me, and I remember Netscape clearly (the end/later part of it anyway).

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#22

Post by gebe »

Using it daily since 13 years back (half of my life) as the sole medium for communicating with most of my friends. First we had a channel on a public network but now we are on our own server since 4 years back. MSN had a stint as the way of communicating with my less tech savvy friends, it is now replaced by Skype. IRC feels kind of impossible to replace though.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#23

Post by muuh-gnu »

IRC died for the same reason Usenet died: some old authoritative farts thumping on some ancient, bizarre rules they set during their youth, some kind of "trve" tech Islam, stopping any kind of progress and scaring away new blood.

They could enforce that kind of bizarro rules during the time IRC and Usenet were the only game in town, but everybody sane jumped off the moment remotely usable alternatives (anything web based like phpbb, shudder) appeared on the horizon.

So you cant really say that IRC and Usenet died some kind of natural death, they were simply slowly suffocated by the deranged "get off my lawn" incumbents.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#24

Post by octotoad »

kybernetyk wrote: post #11
andypants wrote: post #8

I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here. The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc. Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, sin…

Today's new tech startups are run by people who missed the time window when IRC was popular. They grew up with web based chats and instant messengers.

I came on the scene around the time IM and web-based chat rooms (arguably) peaked; 2000. In the 'FOSS' world, aside from mailing lists, IRC was the dominant means of communication.

I'm only turning 27 this year, and I really can't wrap my head around people using things like vendor-specific IM or web-based chat rooms as a replacement for IRC in similar scenarios.

I know it's basically the same thing; a centralised gathering point tied to a server run by a particular company or organisation, but, I don't know...IRC just feels like a more 'transparent', neutral form/protocol to me.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#25

Post by luketongs »

patrickod wrote: post #16

IRC was, at least for me, one of the main reasons that I pursued tech and started programming at a young age. A friend of mine introduced me to a local Irish group of Linux enthusiasts/sysadmins/engineers who put up with my foolish questions long enough for me to learn something. While some channels are very quiet now I still find it one of the best resources when I'm troubleshooting a problem.

If it wasn't for one irc channel, I don't think I would have made it through the first 2 years of programming. Didn't bother them to much (i hope), but just to understand pointers and that at the start, with C, and other things, really helped. 12 years on and wouldn't wanna do anything else.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#26

Post by lmm »

lucian1900 wrote: post #15
kybernetyk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He, for me it's the other way: I like IRC because it's very simplistic. But when I have to do something with XMPP on the protocol level I just want to stab my eyes out because it's a bloated pile of XML. Maybe it depends on tooling. If you have a language that is married with XML - like Java - you probably will have no problems with XMPP. But if you're doing stuff with C you will love the simple structure of IRC.

IRC is extremely idiosyncratic, though. XMPP is much more logical and consistent. Any decent language can deal with trees, although XML is sometimes a little annoying. The potential problem with XML is the overhead. I'm not sure that's been an issue so far, though.

I've heard it argued that the main reason Wave died was all the XML overhead from being built on XMPP.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#27

Post by octotoad »

rgbrenner wrote: post #21
zalew wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. for some context: One of the first times Zuckerberg and I (Mark Andreessen) got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?” http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1

Andreessen: One of the first times Zuckerberg and I got together, in 2005 or 2006, he stopped me in the middle of conversation and asked: “What did Netscape do?” And I said, “What do you mean, what did Netscape do?” And he was like, “Dude, I was in junior high. I wasn’t paying attention. I have a hard time believing that. Zuckerberg is 6 months younger than me, and I remember Netscape clearly (the end/later part of i…

I know not everybody is a nostalgic nerd with a thing for tech industry history, but, yeah, I'm two years younger and even I was aware of the general history of Netscape's journey and choices by the time I was 14-15.

Perhaps he was too busy putting his head down, pumping out a real product instead of procrastinating and focusing on the past :)

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#29

Post by roel_v »

muuh-gnu wrote: post #23

IRC died for the same reason Usenet died: some old authoritative farts thumping on some ancient, bizarre rules they set during their youth, some kind of "trve" tech Islam, stopping any kind of progress and scaring away new blood. They could enforce that kind of bizarro rules during the time IRC and Usenet were the only game in town, but everybody sane jumped off the moment remotely usable alternatives (anything web b…

This. My pet peeve of re: Usenet old farts: 'top vs bottom quoting'. I certainly don't long for the days where I had to wade through flame wars over stupid crap like that.

If there was some way to add ads to Usenet and IRC, we (well, 'they') wouldn't have had to re-invent it all poorly in the form of phpBB and its thousands similar packages, and various 'chat' or 'private messaging' apps and websites. What life could have been, if there was one good dedicated client that could handle all user messaging 'sites'...

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#30

Post by lyetzz »

I really attribute the existence of IRC to what I've been able to achieve in the past few years. Since starting my own network back in 2006 when I was in sixth grade, I've met numerous users who I've been in communication with for years, learned how to setup and manage a Unix server, how to deal with the occasional trolls and denial of service attacks. It even lead to me learning how to code, as I hung out with quite a few devs. In fact, my first online business was a result of some brainstorming on IRC.

Fortunately, for me, most of my friends that I met through IRC are my age (+/- a year or two), which I always found to be pretty neat. The conversation is always active for the most part, and most of the guys are in the US and UK, so it's usually active all day. Over the years, we merged/linked with other networks, welcomed new people, hosted channels for various open-source projects, but just as the article states, usage has definitely declined. I can recall back in 2009-2010 when we had servers in three continents to reduce potential lag when things were really going well. Now, the IRCd hub and services run comfortably on a Linode 512 without links.

Part of the reason I think we're still alive and well is because of the admins (NetAdmins, IRCops, etc). You'll notice that on most networks, admins are arrogant and very strict when it comes to messages per second, or banned words/topics. As long as nothing illegal was being discussed nor transmitted, we don't do anything. In all honestly, I can't recall the last time I used any commands to ban, Gline, Kline, and so on. This is what contributes to a network's longevity.

It's comforting that IRCd(s) are still being actively developed, but I would really love to see its popularity pick back up again. It's really an amazing tool for communication, whether it's used for collaborating with coworkers, discussing open source projects, or even for a casual chat.

If you find yourself looking to connect and need a client, you might want to download Textual (for OS X only, available through the Mac App Store or Github).

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