Re:IRC – Why It Failed (2018) [pdf]
by danShumway on Sunday March 08, 2020 @06:03PM
(#22520926)
Agreed. It's so weird to look at a project/protocol and think that anything less than eternal market dominance is failure.
IRC heavily shaped the modern web, and had market dominance for decades, and built so much user loyalty that die-hard fans are still refusing to migrate off today[0]. IRC isn't the future of chat. But it is completely normal, and often even desirable that successful things should someday die when new paradigms become more useful.
The only way to call IRC a failure is to have such a narrow definition of success that almost nothing in the world could ever be considered successful. Discord is 5 years old. I guarantee you Discord is not going to last 30 years before everyone migrates to a new platform. It probably won't even last 10 years.
Matrix is (in my mind) the future of open chat. If Matrix ends up lasting 30 years before we come up with something better -- and if it gets even half of the market penetration that IRC got -- then I'll be ecstatic. That would be success beyond my wildest dreams.
IRC heavily shaped the modern web, and had market dominance for decades, and built so much user loyalty that die-hard fans are still refusing to migrate off today[0]. IRC isn't the future of chat. But it is completely normal, and often even desirable that successful things should someday die when new paradigms become more useful.
The only way to call IRC a failure is to have such a narrow definition of success that almost nothing in the world could ever be considered successful. Discord is 5 years old. I guarantee you Discord is not going to last 30 years before everyone migrates to a new platform. It probably won't even last 10 years.
Matrix is (in my mind) the future of open chat. If Matrix ends up lasting 30 years before we come up with something better -- and if it gets even half of the market penetration that IRC got -- then I'll be ecstatic. That would be success beyond my wildest dreams.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/1782/