Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

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.

I've been on IRC daily for over 22 years.

I know exactly what you mean. I've gone from one tight knit community to another. In the between time I've either taken short breaks or been hanging out on freenode.

Right now I'm lucky enough to be in a tight clique of people with a private server.

Some of them have been on IRC for as long as it has existed. Most of us also meet IRL regularly.

If you find like minded people IRL you can start up IRC again.

Edit: Speaking of freenode. Just a few years ago I remember having a lot of fun in the wolf game channels with random strangers. It felt like the 90s again.

>I don't feel like it is the same ~vibe~ as when I used to use it growing up in the 90s

What does have the same vibe now as when you used it growing up in the 90s?

No, but I miss the community of people that I used IRC to chat with.

So much so, I was prompted to recreate[0] the #distributed meetmap and add a new link[1].

[0] https://github.com/ryjones/meetmap

[1] https://github.com/ryjones/meetmap/commit/a0148759c2b6b06757...