I've been away from IRC drama for so long. The idea of people fighting over IRC channels, trying to strongarm maintain ownership of them is just so cringeworthy now (nuking channels that advertise an alternative network, holy hell). Sad little king of a sad little hill.
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 remember the Ops, Sops, +v and all the medieval hierarchy that ensued.
I remember channel takeovers.
I remember the flooding and the script kiddies with their obnoxious scripts.
In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles.
It's no different than any other similar drama, when ownership and control of a shared resource is contested.
You may find IRC channel dramas silly, but I used to run a Hackerspace that (back then) communicated mostly via IRC, on Freenode, and I'd be really pissed if I saw this happening then. Conversely, I find similar dramas over Instagram or Twitter handles silly, but that's because I have no attachment to these services.
And structurally, when a bunch of executives get into a dispute over company ownership, from the outside it often looks just as sad and silly as this IRC drama - except with more money at stake. But again, for some people on the inside, it's personal.
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.
Yeah I'd only briefly hang out in the bigger programming channels because of the toxicity. When I was on IRC I would usually stick with a tight-knit group of friends in a private channel. Once IRC started waning, my friends and I left.
This is what makes the recent Freenode takeover so sad - it was a more mature version of IRC that was hijacked by a gang of people with "old IRC" ideals.
That's for network-level drama, sure, but in my experience most of the day-to-day drama was at the channel level and anybody can start a new channel.
And back in its heydays there were enough big IRC networks that you could just hop from one to the other if the admins became a nuisance. Then you had an eggdrop bot synchronize both channels during the migration, good times.
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.
As an IRC user since the early 90s (EFnet and freenode), I can say that it really feels like it is dying. There are still a few popular channels with helpful people, but the vast majority of channels are silent with no one but afk users logged into a seemingly forgotten ‘screen’ session. And of the channels that do have real people, those people often seem to be there for no reason other than to tell people to RTFM, play topic nazi to such an extreme level that apparently nothing is actually on topic, or just generally berate people for having the gall to say something in the channel. Ops are extremely touchy and seem willing to immediately kick people rather than have actual discussions about things that challenge any of their beliefs about a particular topic or how the channel is being run (any such challenge, no matter how genially presented, is perceived as combative and results in a swift kick).
The heyday has past. People moved on, had families and other responsibilities, with no time to sit idly chatting anymore. The newer generations are on various messenger apps, Slack, or Discord.
I used to live on IRC, but it's been years since I was a regular user. Are channel takeovers still a thing? That was one of the things that turned me off on it after getting locked out of the channel I called home for most of a decade.
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