After a few years, setting your status to "Skype me" meant every few minutes a chat from a new person advertising porn sites or other scams. So I stopped using it. Presumably so did everyone else; at some point they disabled the feature. And now Skype is just a tool to talk to people you already know.
I remember an era when chat rooms like IRC had thousands of people online at a time. It didn't scale past this, but it was very exciting.
Maybe there is a market for something like a real-time Reddit, but it's a lot harder to pull off because there needed to be many people on at the same time before it could but critical mass.
> something like a real-time Reddit
Reddit did that with Robin, their April's Fools Day experiment two years ago. It randomly connected small groups of the participating redditors in chatrooms, and would gradually merge the chatrooms if the majority of the users voted to do so. It was a lot of fun while it lasted, but I don't think anyone managed to successfully replicate it since.
Dating sites, while not what you want, are very illustrative. On open messaging platforms like OkCupid, in which anyone can message anyone, women are barraged with messages from men that want to talk about sex. How do you filter them out? If you do manage to filter them out, how do you surface a reasonable number of good conversation matches?
The only solution I've seen in this thread is offering opt-out. But all that's doing is offering people a way to not use a product, it's not fixing the problem.
Even relatively well funded and mature dating sites solve this by either offering finicky filter options to users, or really blunt filters (women have to initiate the conversation).
This is probably the reason it was abandoned.
As one of the sibling comments points out, once such a system becomes popular it's also going to be a target for spammers. If there have been any advances in chatbot AI over the past couple of decades that is also likely to make the problem worse.
I guess there would be creeps, as anywhere where you can be exposed to unknown people, but I don't think the problem was worse than elsewhere. In fact, in my later experiences in chats, dating sites, etc., most women seemed to be (understandably) on the defensive due to the amount of stalkers and creeps they had to endure regularly, and in ICQ it didn't seem so much that way, I got plenty of conversations, girls (and guys) giving me their address for exchanging stamps or letters, etc., which I found much harder later in other media. Although maybe it's that both the Internet and myself were young and naive back then.
Anyway, if stalkers did become a big problem, surely the tech could have improved to deal with it.
There are probably several factors, but I think the main reason it was abandoned is simply network effects. MSN Messenger rose for reasons orthogonal to this, and then no one of the main IMs that succeeded it implemented this. Sadly, the question of what IMs gain more traction depends more on network effects than actual quality (see Whatsapp vs. Telegram, etc.)
Back in the day (yeah, I'm old), you could drop into an IRC channel of strangers and be having a good conversation within minutes[1]. ICQ, as mentioned, had a 'find friend' feature, and many other early social platforms encouraged like-minded strangers to interact.
So we all end up just talking to the same 20 or people we've always spoken to, re-enforcing the echo-chamber-effect, and never introducing new ideas and viewpoints into our lives.
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[1] IRC these days, if you are lucky to find an active channel, is now so cliquéy that any interlopers are largely ignored.
But there is a lot you can still do with it.
You’re right that people didn’t understand Facebook’s privacy model. People assume that privacy by obscurity is a guarantee. Never mind that anyone could write a bot that did what Graph Search did. Graph Search was actually more conservative than it needed to be to avoid surprises.
In the end that all mattered less than the fact that it wasn’t solving a problem people had.
I loved it. And this was back in 2000 maybe.
I'm sorry to hear that.
It was so incredibly easy to find and talk to new people. It seems like everything about the current internet makes that deliberately harder. Even sending e-mail to strangers is hard now, you'll likely end up in their spam folder.
Just kidding. I would definitely support such a crowdfunding within my modest means. The problem is that I don't think the tech is the main issue (after all, ICQ did it with 90s tehc). Obtaining an userbase is the main issue, and network effects go against new contenders.
Maybe the fact that pretty much everyone has a digital camera in their pocket now means the world has changed into a world where ICQ as the OP described it just can't exist anymore
Too many people named Dan.
"females who are single, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing" would have returned precise results.
I met a guy to play Dota 2 with in 2012 and we've been friends since.
Let me explain myself. In the late 90s, there was an IM client called ICQ. For starters, its UI was leaps and bounds ahead of anything to be seen in the next decade, and it had functionality like bots or groups, that has again become widespread a few years ago.
But what I'm talking about is the fact that I could look for "female, age between 16 and 20, who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music and is available for chat" and results would come up. You could enter your data, interests, hobbies, etc. in the program and mark yourself as available (only if you wanted) and it was a really nice way to meet people. I collected stamps at the time so I remember I would search for people who were stamp collectors in countries for which I had no stamp, leading to stamp exchanges apart from some interesting conversation (as you could also throw some of your interests in in the search window).
I thought that was the future and the tech could only get better from there, but then came MSN Messenger, with really bare-bones features in general and in particular no "searchable" functionality, and displaced ICQ. And since then, nothing similar has appeared. Instant messengers are focused on talking to people you already know, and if you want to meet new people, you have to use specific-purpose communities or dating sites. But good luck finding someone who likes writing, RPGs and electronic music at the same time... That function of searching people by interests in a huge directory of people (not restricted, e.g., to a dating site) is what I thought would take the world by storm, and as far as I know it doesn't even exist anymore at enough scale to be meaningful, at least in the West (maybe in WeChat, QQ or one of those apps used in Asia they have something similar, I don't know).