Being powered by IRC is not the same as using it, in the sense meant here.

What do you mean? Every viewer also connects to their IRC chat, hence "using" it. Heck, I personally connect to it using my IRC client.

The discussion is about users who use IRC directly and consciously. Many of Twitch's users have no clue what IRC is. Imagine a new social app that used SMTP in its implementation. You wouldn't bring it up in a discussion about the popularity of email.

No one denies IRC's continued popularity as a protocol for broadcasting text over a network. Slack itself uses it. But it's dying out as measured by the number of people who say to their colleagues e.g. "get on IRC, I have something to tell you."

> The discussion is about users who use IRC directly and consciously.

From the parent post I replied to, "IRC's user base is declining". Every single person watching a Twitch stream is an IRC user, whether they know it or not.

How do you determine the popularity of something? How many people use it.

Android is extremely popular. Do most of the folks realize they're using an Android phone? Nope.

Does it mean Android isn't popular? Nope.

If you don't have a similar understanding, we'll have to agree to disagree.

> The point is more that it's dying out as measured by people who say to their colleagues e.g. "jump on IRC, I've got something to tell you."

Of course they wouldn't, you're already speaking with them. Slack is fine for trusted networks of peers (businesses), but not much else. I won't start chatting with any my friends using it, nor would I bother to sign up somewhere to get access to a random Slack channel/community instead of using IRC, where I also coincidentally wouldn't need any of Slack's features.

Of course they're all IRC users inadvertently. That doesn't add to IRC's popularity. If Twitch disabled IRC and switched its chatrooms to some ghetto socket.io app, most of its users wouldn't know.

> Of course they wouldn't, you're already speaking with them. Slack is fine for trusted networks of peers (businesses), but not much else. I won't start chatting with any my friends using it, nor would I bother to sign up somewhere to get access to a random Slack channel/community instead of using IRC, where I also coincidentally wouldn't need any of Slack's features.

No, what I meant was, people no longer think of IRC as the tool to use to talk about projects and communities. They used to. That was its primary use case. That use case is shrinking, so IRC is becoming less popular.

> How do you determine the popularity of something? How many people use it. Android is extremely popular. Do most of the folks realize they're using an Android phone? Nope.

This isn't quite true, is it? Most Android users seem to know they're using Android. I could be wrong.

Again, your definition of popularity is different than mine, but either way my post still refutes his point about the declining userbase.

> No, what I meant was, people no longer think of IRC as the tool to use to talk about projects and communities. They used to. That was its primary use case. That use case is shrinking, so IRC is becoming less popular.

There's plenty of other avenues to use these days, so the numbers have diluted, absolutely. EDIT: There was no social media, very few IM clients... But the channels I'm in have been steadily rising (Freenode). http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/irc-002....

Quakenet took a huge drop once it stopped being used to find CS matches.

> This isn't quite true, is it? Most Android users seem to know they're using Android. I could be wrong.

Obviously this is going to be anecdotal, but with the ~20 people I know who aren't technologically savvy, they'd only be able to tell you if they're using an Apple phone or not. My mother, for instance, has no clue that she's using a Windows phone. EDIT: I guess that really goes to show something about the success of Apple's marketing.

Try "IRC's mindshare is declining". rather than "IRC's popularity is declining".

Agreed, that would have been a far better term if that was the meaning he was attempting to portray.

> Obviously this is going to be anecdotal, but with the ~20 people I know who aren't technologically savvy, they'd only be able to tell you if they're using an Apple phone or not. My mother, for instance, has no clue that she's using a Windows phone.

I think this has quite a bit to do with what class of phone they buy. Android is marketed very heavily in certain contexts when buying a phone, just as iPhone is. Walk into Best Buy and ask for help on buying a smartphone that isn't basic and Android or iPhone (or Windows phone even) will be part of the pitch. Similar to how if you buy a sports car you are probably going to know something about the engine, if not when going into it, you probably will by the time the salesman is done. If you are buying a commuter car, they may or may not distinguish the engine, and you may or may not care enough to remember.

Agreed, although I believe the end goal of my comment was that after leaving the store, the term "Android" is completely forgotten, whereas "Apple" is almost a household term because you see them everywhere in pop culture—movies, the news, in schools, etc.

>> Of course they're all IRC users inadvertently. That doesn't add to IRC's popularity. If Twitch disabled IRC and switched its chatrooms to some ghetto socket.io app, most of its users wouldn't know.

Saying if Twitch disabled IRC is like saying if Slack changed to an IRC core..., which is not meaningful when discussing how many users Slack and IRC have. Twitch has several millions of users of influence. If they didn't use IRC, IRC would have millions fewer users, yet, Twitch chose IRC. Some of Twitch is IRC, and some of IRC is now Twitch, and millions of people use Twitch consciously. Twitch is the IRC client.

If a proprietary IRC network that is managed as basically an API layer for a service that isn't primarily about chat is the primary tentpole for a platform...

That doesn't seem like a really fantastic outcome for IRC. I guess if you're looking to come up with a conclusion that IRC has more users it is a useful tool. If you're looking to see what the future of distributed and local FOSS and corporate software team communication is? Less so.

Android is built on top of Linux, is it reasonable to say that the popularity of Android phones mean that Linux is popular?

I don't know if it is reasonable, but that's what is always said. The primary argument for Linux popularity is always "Android!".

Also, in this context I think it's pretty relevant. My personal opinion is that if Slack was just an IRC client instead of having its own propertiary backend, it would have been a better product.

Of course! And by digging deeper, we can also establish that cellphones are popular, and that electronics are also popular. It's going the other way (away from generality) which lessens popularity, since you're targeting something _more_ specific.

I think that's the problem with IRC. The idea of decentralized IRC networks means that channels are scattered amongst multiple IRC networks. IRC is already not as usable as Slack, and to have multiple networks decreases usability even further. I love IRC, but I see why Slack is full of win.

EFnet is a single entity in the exact same way that Slack is. All channels belong to only their service. Introducing yet another chat service only adds another place to the list. https://xkcd.com/927

It's also nice that I don't have to signup anywhere to use most IRC servers.

Don't get me wrong—Slack is the perfect tool for businesses, but not for much else.

But decentralized is the best thing ever!

I hate that argument. If decentralized was so great, then it'd be more popular, but it's not. More and more centralized stuff is exploding in popularity.

But that brings us back to mbillie and "if <x> were so great, everyone would already use/do <x>". Does popularity necessarily imply superiority? Adoption just means it's easy for anyone to get aboard. But that doesn't mean it's implicitly good, in any other way. Worse is better works, for example, if one option is more approachable than the other. Decentralization is good, as a rule of the thumb. Not having everyone on the same network, but having the ability to set up your own network or service based on the technology, is a good thing. Why would you want to have everyone on the same network? Networks are often topic-related. For example Freenode for programming-related topics. Minecraft is pretty focused on EsperNet. Quakenet used to be the place to online gaming. This is usefull and good, since communities sort themselves by interest, views, tools or what have you, by default. So why not encourage self-sustainability through means of decentralization?

Centralization is being driven by a lot of things, not least of which is that decentralization is really really hard. But a lot of it comes from mobile -- the idea behind decentralized apps before mobile came along was that bandwidth was not very dear -- oh, sure, it was limited in the days when IRC first became popular, but there was no reason to leave any of it unused. Local compute power was the same -- you may not have had a lot of it, but there was no reason to leave what you had sitting idle. Mobile is different. Idle CPU power can mean the CPU is throttled down to save on power and heat dissipation. Instead of staying connected to a server at all times, use "push" notifications so the server can let you know when it's worth using battery power and metered data to talk to the server.

Decentralized systems, and peer-to-peer systems, and even centralized systems designed around computers designed to sit next to a wall outlet and draw power from a practically unlimited source are all being replaced by systems that are more centralized and better equipped to talk to mobile. AOL Instant Messenger is dying because it was built around an older paradigm and, at least last time I bothered to try it, is an incredible battery drain on Android devices. Newer messenger apps that are built mobile first or at least make mobile an equal partner to PCs are winning instead. And it's the same for group chat -- IRC is built for old-fashioned PCs, Slack is built with mobile in mind.

It's also worth noting that it's not clear what decentralization brings to the table from the perspective any single organization. Most organizations will want a central authority for the history of their group communications.

Such facilities are bolted onto IRC, but never truly integrate with it the way other solutions have offered.

Centralized is generally easier to implement a given feature in, so it's easier to support more features.

It's also harder to base a business atop decentralized network, and when building a new network there is less of a business case in spending the extra time, stress and expertise to make it decentralized (vs. centralized).

Let's state explicitly why it's harder to base a business atop a decentralized network - because a business makes money by creating friction in the service, and in a decentralized model a friction too strong will be routed around.

Well, I think it depends on whether you are talking about decentralized networks, as I read the parent to your comment to mean, or decentralized ownership/administration of networks, as I read your comment to mean.

That is, the network can be decentralized but still administered by a single business entity, in which case you theoretically get a network more robust to outages, or the network can be composed of many separate entities, in which case you are theoretically protected from the bad behavior of any one administering entity, since there are many others (as in your example).

The other reason it may be harder to build a business atop a decentralized network is that the costs associated extra hardware, software, and locations and troubleshooting required to achieve the gains of a decentralized network may outweigh the gains achieved by doing so.