It may depend a lot on the IRC network and channel. IRC these days seems to be confined to open-source software discussion, so the communities are more helpful.
Unfortunately, while most/all of the tech folks hang out on IRC, it's much less used by a lot of the marketing/business people I deal with. I should use it more routinely myself but the fact is that it's not that widely used by some groups.
sure.... I still use it. But now IRC is much much more fringe, somewhat like usenet, ftp, telnet, etc is very fringe these days. It used to be like THE social networking tool. Somewhat like facebook. Maybe one day facebook too will be used by developers to communicate while everyone else is in virtual worlds
Yes, totally. Nowadays IRC is mostly a thing I use very passively to stay in various open source project channels. Back in the day it was a place where other folks who were internet savvy would convene to discuss just about anything. I was in lots of tightly knit small channels and met plenty of friends I still have.
I didn’t use IRC until the mid 2000s, but in my opinion until around ~2012 it was still quite active for many communities.
IRC is still a thing, and a very popular one at that. I've found that it's a great tool for finding like-minded tech people with relatively less 'noise' than in similar Slack or Discord groups.
I don't know where you went, but there are still plenty of people using IRC. Not as many as were in the past, but it's still popular enough with the crowd of people I hang around.
IRC is still alive and kicking. I have been using it for around 10 years. I still use it everyday, along with a handful of my "real life" friends. I feel IRC has always been a slightly more "underground/nerdy" technology and will always remain under the surface of other mainstream user technologies such as FB and Twitter.
The only time I have ever used it was about 4 years ago to get some help on Haskell. And the only reason for using it was the community was there. Although I sensed there is a positive shibboleth effect when you meet the person in real life. So maybe IRC is good for virtue signalling / networking.
For other communities I see they are using Discord, Discourse, Reddit or Slack these days. I have no favorites, I just go along to wherever the community is. Unless it is Facebook, then sorry no, not joining FB.
I only started using irc about 5 years ago but I have been using it daily since then and yeah the people on it aren't too bad. I have only really seen tech stuff on it recently, all the non tech irc channels I was in moved to discord :L
I don't think it's that hard to use IRC. I've certainly run into some non-tech folks on IRC. But yes, I guess it does tend to be more exclusive and maybe that's not a bad thing.
It's probably just relative. I would think the proportion on IRC is now more technical than ever before.
Twenty years ago, you would need to know where to plug a cable in to even have a computer turn on. For better or worse, the barrier for entry these days is a lot lower.
IRC has remained relatively the same while other services like Facebook or even MSN Messenger promised the world.
I don't agree that IRC is dead. It will continue to outlast many companies.
reply