> current toxicity of social media

The only response I can conjure up for this is “wat”

IRC in my experience is the most toxic and mean-spirited place on earth. 4chan is easier to take because I can justify their meanness to lulz. People on IRC seem to be out to kill people’s spirit.

There are some exceptions like python on free node which is heavily moderated, but by and large (in my nearly 15 years of heavy IRCing) it is not for the faint hearted.

Sounds like you might be blaming a protocol for some poor channel choices.

There are still plenty of educational/social IRC communities that welcome curious people of all skill levels.

I can vouch for https://hashbang.sh (irc.hashbang.sh/6697) which has piles of industry leaders as regulars that prefer investing in open federated standards for internet communication over the endless array of hip walled garden flavor of the week chat systems.

We give out free bouncers/shells to anyone too :)

I concur. I've learned a lot listening and participating in chat rooms, but not all of them are the same. Some are definitely toxic, some are uplifting -- intellectually or otherwise. My personal recipe is once I have a topic in mind, I browse through the channel list, filtering by popularity. In my experience, "toxicity", for the lack of a better term, is proportional to popularity (crowdedness) and mainstreamness. In practical terms, if a channel has a lot of members (150+) that's not a good sign. If it's also a mainstream topic, that's a definite red flag. In my case, I would consider joining that channel a waste of time and energy. If I'm interested in a mainstream topic, sorting the channels by user count will quickly reveal where people go to escape the madness; as channels get big and sickly the interesting and helpful people tend to go to one of the sattelite channels that don't have those problems. As an example, the best channel on Python I found for my purposes had ~5-15 active users per day. I'm especially happy with IRC, because I am intrinsically drawn to more obscure technologies and their channels don't have these problems.

That said, IRC is made by the communities using it. The only, but a significant technological advantage it has over other chat mediums is its minimalism. Barebones chat is much more conducive to technical discussions, than the bloated alternatives, and I think the same applies for other kinds of discussions as well.

Or equivalently you might be praising a protocol for some excellent channel choices (to be accurate, this would be a response to the grand-grandparent comment).

My personal experience suggests that IRC communities are just like other communities, that is, with a right amount of moderation and a right set of users they will survive, otherwise they will fail.

It's true that IRC is not free of tension and caustic groups. That said, like reddit, you can find very nice places to chat. #electronics #emacs both are very light on issues and very openminded (maybe too open minded some would say).

I talk a lot in #emacs and I do treat it like a coffee klatch, but when people come with questions, I try to interrupt myself and at least address their questions.

I like #emacs. It's like a gathering of friends who happen to use Emacs.

#emacs is an off-topic channel, if you have any questions(that you can't find just by googling), then it's best to use stackexchange/reddit.

Sorry, I'll try to do a better job to answer your question in there next time I see it.

hi, i'm python476 (i know, awkward), so you know I share your sentiment about emacs. And #electronics is similar. Just a bunch of dudes who like that topic, but it's rarely on topic, and they're one of the most friendly bunch I've seen.

Wait, you think #python on Freenode is a friendly place? It's consistently the worst channel I've visited on IRC. The language is fantastic though.

I think it reflects the community's extremes. I have been using less and less Python because so many of the community can at times be their own worst enemy or mine. Personally I steer people to different first languages just so they don't get stuck only knowing Python.

What channels are you using? Killing peoples spirit maybe once in a blue moon someone is rude. However, if anything I would say people are polite than they used to be. People still using IRC like IRC why would they want to actively harm the channels they use.

wow, i have not made such experiences on IRC, worst things happened to me were questions go unnoticed.

but i also use it only for very specific technical topics.

I saw some, people can be tense, angry, mean, sometimes even so while wrong. I remember a dude going down on me because he misread quicksort in my question and started to unleash unjustified ad-hominem insulting comments until he/she realized.

People are people I guess.

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

What channels do you frequent that can be used as "social channels" and aren't either a technical QA channel, or a those channels' "free talk" companion that nobody really uses?

I think you'll find that many social channels are a well kept secret. No one wants to ruin a good thing by advertising it to the public. Use IRC for a while, explore the bigger channels, start channels for your friends, and eventually you'll find your way into other social channels.

There are plenty. Breakouts from them forming their own communities every few years. The base of our community has been around for at least a decade and the main channel is on its fourth iteration since I joined.

Telling exact channel names would out me pretty fast though I reckon.

Same in my 'social' bubble, started as a small gaming community that branched off a bigger one (you know, free forums, then a site, then self-hosted forums, IRC channel which later turned into a Skype group chat which nowadays is a Discord channel, etc). These things just form organically.

I also met my Wife on IRC, ~20 years ago (after chatting for 2 years). Explaining then to people how we met was difficult, so we ended up just saying through a mutual friend - which was also true.

I strongly doubt it we would have met, in this day and age. The mainstream online socialising of today is superficial and desperate.

Today, a remote worker, I communicate with my colleagues over IRC. It's rare that I'd speak to a stranger on it.

> The mainstream online socialising of today is superficial and desperate.

You say that but it's a sweeping generalization; a filtering down to more close-knit and direct interaction still happens all over the place. You're just not 'in' that kinda thing at the moment.

You're likely to have filtered a lot more than you think simply by consciously selecting which server and which channel to join. I don't know which kind of filtering you're referring to, but if you're talking about those that constitute echo chambers, IRC isn't really helping much in that regard.