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Comment by pling | Hacker News Reader

IRC has always been wonderful in times of trouble. I'm really surprised that people have abandoned it over the last decade.

I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide including from ham and shortwave.

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That was truly a moment in the spotlight for Slashdot. It's just sad that it has mostly died due to continued neglect.

So many reports of other airplanes going missing on IRC that morning/day. Where were you on 9/11? “On IRC.”

I wonder if there will be a service that hits the sweet spot of cool community instant messaging over a large group of people in the next generation of technology, I think so.

Well Twitter is where everyone goes now when something is broken. I'm not sure its the right solution but it's part of the way there.

Twitter and all of these other commercial services lack the sheer resiliency of IRC.

Taking down an IRC network (assuming DNS is not affected or users have cached list of servers in their client) is incredibly difficult.

Twitter doesn't fail-whale as often but it's still centralised and not overly reliable or robust in comparison.

Taking down an IRC network (assuming DNS is not affected or users have cached list of servers in their client) is incredibly difficult.

Yes, but remember that DDoSing individual servers and taking over channels through the resulting netsplits was a favorite pastime of bored teenagers around the world.

That's not so easy to do any more.

I'd say it's easier if anything. http://www.nimbusddos.com/

> We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio

There was similar activity on IRC right after the 2013 Boston bombings.

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