IRC is dead, long live IRC

I also use a lot of IRC. But it just seems that most of the networks are already rather quiet. Though Freenode, galaxynet and some others, I believe, are still growing?

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#5

Post by klrr » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:47 AM UTC

IRC dead? I use it everyday.

IRC and Email is the only sane ways to communicate online at the moment. (In my opinion)

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#6

Post by grimboy » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:51 AM UTC

klrr wrote: post #5

IRC dead? I use it everyday. IRC and Email is the only sane ways to communicate online at the moment. (In my opinion)

Try reading beyond the title?

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#7

Post by oneandoneis2 » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:54 AM UTC

I'm permanently logged in to over a dozen channels. They're all related to some open-source project or other.

In my experience, IRC today is a godsend if you want to talk to techie types, and largely pointless for anything else.

So it'd be no surprise to me if most of the people reading HN use IRC all the time, whilst the majority of the rest of the world considers it dead (if it's heard of it at all)

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#8

Post by andypants » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 10:56 AM UTC

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, since, you know, these are tech startups...

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#9

Post by lucian1900 » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 11:01 AM UTC

It's such a terrible protocol and a pain in the ass all the time.

Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.

Re: IRC is dead, long live IRC

#10

Post by kybernetyk » Fri, Jan 04, 2013, 11:04 AM UTC

lucian1900 wrote: post #9

It's such a terrible protocol and a pain in the ass all the time. Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.

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.