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Comment by petre | Hacker News Reader

Or give them a choice to create an account if they want to but not needlessly bug them about it.

Discord basically copied IRC and added voice chat. One didn't need an account for IRC why should they need one on Discord? Maybe to retain their nickname but that's it. And it was just a password, no email no phone number no nothing else.

I really liked the temporary and anarchic nature of IRC. No one was really in control.

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I'm in the other camp on this one. I think the best thing to happen to IRC were the services that let you keep your nick or your channel without needing to maintain an army of bots. Channel takeovers on EFnet were a fact of life and it made things pretty unpleasant imo.

You created another nick or another channel and moved on with life. I liked EFnet, although the conversation got disrupted by troublemakers all the time, I met some really interesting people on it. Freenode was also too nice with nick registration and nicer people and no stinking IRC network task force on the channels like on UnderNet. You totally had the option to be a nomad or register a nickname or a channel.

The next logical step would have been to make it encrypted and add p2p voice chat via DCC or some other method. SILC tried the former but failed to gain traction, people either stuck with IRC or moved on to AIM and Yahoo Messaneger.

I don't see the similarity you draw between IRC and Discord, other than the fact they both have text chat. If you think nobody was really in control of IRC then you must have missed out on some of the structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC_operator#Operator_types

IRC is federated. Most of the ops were volunteers. They were technically in control of the network until troblemakers launched DoS attacks and caused a split in order to take over channels. Discord has a very similar interface to most IRC clients.

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