Comment by Grumbledour
4 years ago
I always saw it as a bug tbh, but reading drew's footnote on that right now, I am starting to think you and he are right!
But I think it is more complicated, because it also makes clear that IRC is not an ideal medium for many forms of messaging. It works great for free for all chat, where the discussion happens right now. But it is not great for group chats with friends or when information needs to be disseminated across a community, but I have both of these seen used often.
It just not asynchronous, while at the same time, because of the constant open connection, also not great to use on the go.
It's somehow nice to have a medium for "right here and now", but it sucks to not be able to answer a question or miss important conversation because you didn't look for 10 minutes.
Of course, multi-tier conversation options have helped traditionally, but I think that's also why i never bothered with IRC much, because it was always 3 dozen people idling who always seemed to burst in conversation once you got disconnected.
To add to this: I think IRC strikes an interesting balance between async and sync conversations -- Schrödinger's synchronization, in a sense. In public conversations, there's no expectation that anyone will be present for anything and no expectation that they should read the things they missed, which is good. However, among mutual bouncer users there's a culture of sending messages you expect to be read later, in their own time. We essentially get the best of both worlds.
I wrote a little bit about this facet of IRC culture in this article:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/11/24/A-philosophy-for-instant-...
> because it also makes clear that IRC is not an ideal medium for many forms of messaging.
Back in the day where people used to differentiate between IRC and IMs (more importantly, chat vs messaging), I don't really think this is correct. In today's era of Discord/Slack/SMS though, it certainly would seem like a detriment. I do agree with those other people, though. What was nice about IRC (to me) was how imperative it was. You could post a cool thing, question or discussion topic in a channel and have responses coming through within the minute. When you're done, you just close the window and it's like it was never there. I remember feeling like I was using a secret spy communicator when I had IRC downloaded in middle school, the whole ephemeral nature of it was the coolest to me back then.