IRC has existed for over 30 years and was widely popular for the big part of that timespan. Yet no one ever made it into or extended it into a realistic competitor to the modern wall garden proprietary chat platforms.
Is there a fundamental issue with IRC that precludes that? Did no one just bother? Is it the specific mentality among its core users that "absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature" that lead to its demise?
Even if his numbers are wrong, I'll never believe you that IRC was more used than say, AIM or ICQ, let alone any of the popular modern instant messenger and chat apps.
Ok, fine. But can we at least reverse the gamer/geek label. It was always a geek tool - gaming was far secondary. Look at bash.org and tell me the majority of IRC was used for gaming vs. geeking.
There's Pest [0], but I don't think it tries to be more usable, maybe even less so. I think it's hard to take old standards and put modern features on them; at some point it's more beneficial to just invent your own thing.
Is there a fundamental issue with IRC that precludes that? Did no one just bother? Is it the specific mentality among its core users that "absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature" that lead to its demise?
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