Interesting... I don't spend any time in IRC Channels. I find them distracting. But it's cool that some people have gotten a job or two out of a Channel.
Any IRC channel I've been to that develops into a community spends 90+% time talking about everything else except the topic it's ostensibly about. It's weird from the POV of the newcomers, but for old-timers, most of the on-topic things were talked about to death many times over already.
I spent a number of years wasting time on IRC looking at and chatting to people about techincal issues, plus a bit of humourous banter. These days the all of my income comes from activities where IRC is the main means of communication.
Same here. We've had a private channel running for over a decade now and as people move to new jobs and shuffle around, the channel is always home.
We've even built a bot to capture URLs and tweet them to a private handle so people can check out sites after work or while away from the channel.
To the person asking if IRC is distracting, it's a LOT less distracting than the hipster that sits next to me and is constantly checking his smartphone every time an SMS comes in. Pavlov would roll over in his grave.
Oddly enough, I prefer the IRC channels I frequent to not be logged, just like the conversation I'm having at the corner coffee shop (probably) isn't logged beyond the ears of those who hear it.
To me it helps create more of a community feel. Often times you'll see active community members turn problems they deal with on IRC into blogs, articles or even books to spread that knowledge.
Really I think it's just safe to say that anyone who was on irc in the late 90s probably had their career benefit from it. #winprog got me my first job at the tail of the boom (and I did terribly at it) and that definitely wasn't a 'scene' kind of channel (ridiculous Wired article aside), but I definitely still have a certain kind of fraternity with the other people I occupied that space with (in a different channel, as well as semi-regular real life meetings, now) and a lot of those people have gone on to do great stuff.
My main issue with IRC is channel rot. Every channels I was once a part of died. Most channels that are still "active" are in fact filled with quiet lurkers.
Otherwise IRC is still my favourite. I simply don't visit anymore...
This is a feature. Most of the people on an IRC channel are lurkers. And the channels are very quiet so that people can hear you when you do speak. Believe me, I wish they were quieter, because even as they are they tend to be too distracting for me to lurk there while working.
It does seem creepy. Our company's salespeople laugh at the programmers because we really love to gather in one physical room, then sit silently next to each other typing on laptops and communicating largely via Jabber chat and IRC, even though we are two feet away from each other. If you've never tried to concentrate on programming this seems like alien behavior, but it actually makes a lot of sense, for the same reason that it makes sense for all the Drupal devs to sit in one IRC channel but almost never speak.
If you crave more chat, join more channels in parallel.
I wouldn't know which channels to hang on on IRC these days. For the past 10 years even populated channels are a ghost town of join and leave notices, and not any discussion.
I don't miss IRC, since I still use it, but I miss certain channels. I swear every linux related channel I go into is full of a bunch of a-holes. 20 years ago I got a lot of help (and I hope provided a lot of assistance myself) in #linux and others, but now it feels like I'm offending a channel when asking for help.
Yeah no thanks. I've been on there a few times. That channel is filled with a bunch of sweary and self-centered people. It's probably the anonymity but I'd rather hang out in r/startups before I'd go back to the IRC chat.
FWIW this is exactly my experience with pretty much every single IRC server and channel i've been the last 15 years or so. It used to be more... chatty before that, but over time people just join and idle.
I wonder if the ability to have IRCs running all the time actually harmed IRC since at the past (90s mainly and perhaps very early 2000s) if someone was in a channel, they'd be up for chatting too whereas now channels are full of "zombies".
How many IRC channels have you hung out in? Every channel I've ever been in with any sort of community has stuff like this pop up pretty regularly (things that may be "off-topic" by some definition, but are interesting, and spark some interesting conversation).
Channels where there are hard and fast rules about keeping the discussion strictly "on-topic" don't tend to be channels I hang out in. The same would be true for HN.
> If you go on IRC now every channel is idle, no chat, just joins quits and parts, boring, dead.
Not my experience at all. The channels I'm in have had a fairly stable number of users for at least the last decade. These are channels with hundreds or even thousands of users. There is lots of discussion in these channels every day. Sometimes so much I can't keep up with it if I'm there participating. I'm in mostly tech related channels, though.
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