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Comment by _cbdev | Hacker News Reader

Exactly what I thought. The technical "difficulty" of joining an IRC Channel through the ancient incantations of actually using a text-based interface instead of some fancy Webapp is enough of a deterrent to serve as basic divider between the people you want to have in a channel and the rest.

The barrier of entry to this thing seems to be the goodwill of "someone".

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Not sure how I feel about this. This is 'HackerNews'. joining an IRC channel is definitely something this crowd knows how to do.

Or at least, it's supposed to :)

    > This is 'HackerNews'

Which is exactly the intended user base of this app. The "crowd" in this case is community non-members.

In my experience, there's an abundance of people just barely able to fire up their favorite IDE and hack something together in some kind of rapid prototyping web 2.7 thingamajig they don't even understand fully, preferrably using the latest JS(-based) framework and a (seemingly) random combination of currently hip "stack" technologies and packing all this on about 5 to 10 'cloud' instances without any knowledge of anything beyond the web.

So, while I agree with your 'Or at least, it's supposed to :)', there's an awful lot of people whose claim to 'Hackerdom' is going to some kind of 'Hacker School' or '-Weekend'.

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