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Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

very cool. I started with IRC circa 92, on a VAX VMS system after discovering it using Gopher :)

Was great, though very addictive. The internet wasn't very well known, and not many people were online, and it was very common to make friends all around the world. I travelled and met a lot of people all over the world through IRC. I remember quite a number of people starting relationships and having babies ( many of which would be late 20s now... crazy).

I remember in 93 when tanks were rolling into moscow getting live updates from people who were there. Was a glimpse of the future yet to come around major world events.

Slowly more and more people started turning up on IRC, new IRC networks appeared, people started to perfer networking with people in their local country or local state.... then later mostly people in their local city.

Then it started to die off with the rise of the web and alternative chat software.

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> Then it started to die off with the rise of the web and alternative chat software.

That's news to me and the ~eight IRC networks I'm on.

With how many members? Even the most niche discord channels will likely have more users than your 8 IRC channels.

networks, not channels

IRC isn't "dying off." Many (many) projects still use it as their main communication channel for developers/users.

sure.... I still use it. But now IRC is much much more fringe, somewhat like usenet, ftp, telnet, etc is very fringe these days. It used to be like THE social networking tool. Somewhat like facebook. Maybe one day facebook too will be used by developers to communicate while everyone else is in virtual worlds

ftp is fringe because it's unencrypted and deals very poorly with NAT, and has performance/scaling issues for huge file transfers and transfers with huge numbers of discrete files.

telnet is fringe because it's totally plaintext and has obviously been replaced by ssh2 everywhere.

whereas irc daemons can easily be linked together by TLS1.2 and irc clients can also talk to servers over TLS.

Yeah, it’s easy to get nostalgic about old stuff, particularly when the old stuff was legit good. But man, FTP and telnet needed to die in a fire.

What do you think of TFTP then? All things have their uses. Outside of the valley, a ton of things don't live on untrusted networks.

Someday when there's a universal way to share files between people on a network without passwords FTP might die. So far it is the least painful way of having a place people can just dump files to and grab files from without authentication.

Unfortunately, as of today, the majority of "computer operators" struggle to share a file if it requires more than a single operation of "drag/drop".

In 2018 teaching totally non-technical users to effectively use Dropbox and OneDrive is even a challenge, and those companies have a great many staff positions between them whose full time job is UI design and usability.

Why are you so condescending towards users? Maybe pretending that everyone who uses a computer and isn't a gerybeard is a drooling moron is part of why computers suck so much in 2018.

> somewhat like usenet, ftp, telnet, etc

Don't conflate protocols that are terrible with protocols that aren't 'hip'. ftp and telnet have been replaced (thankfully) and should die in a fire. Usenet is still cool though.

It's not really anything to do with the protocols, they don't really matter. The protocols represented the tools you could use to consume the internet, usenet allowed you to follow special interest groups, ftp allowed you to get files ( back in the day of public domain and shareware ), telnet let you into other systems, either for another shell or to play MUDs :) IRC allowed you to chat, Gopher allowed you to find information and resources, and of course there was email. Other than email ( which is a super crappy system ), all the others are fringe tools these days.

And speaking of Usenet... https://www.eternal-september.org/

In my opinion the reasons for loss of userbase & mindshare:

1 Spam and noise -> No proper authentication and moderating system for channels. It's hard to keep bad agents out of channels.

2 Competition -> Forums had more features (including a solution for point 1, also https) and didn't require a special client. If you could easily send cat gifs in chats IRC would have been great.

there was comic chat :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

Oh man, so many hours in my teens on this. It was my tumblr, I think.

If your network runs services you can set your channel to require being authed with nickserv to join. Sure people can make a new account if you ban them but they can on a web forum too.

Or you can set channel so only voiced nicks can speak and de-voice a nick to moderate.

Or even make an access list so only specific authed nicks can join. None of this is ideal though I agree.

Why is the biggest loss of userbase not attributed to really bad barrier of entry and UI? As a layperson it's much easier and friendlier to join Discord/related software which has a ton more features.

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