Re:The User Always Loses
by DataWorker on Saturday September 05, 2020 @10:31AM
(#24383797)
You are counting 2 year olds in the denominator. IRC and Usenet were the internet. If you used a computer you used these. But yes, computers were less common then, especially amongst two year olds.
He’s also counting only Americans. There never was a time when normal people hanged out on IRC. Wikipedia has ~120 millions people on the Internet in 1997, and 10 millions IRC users at its peak in 2003. So 8% of Internet users on IRC is a wildly optimistic upper bound. 1% is probably closer to the truth.
Re:The User Always Loses
by chris-orgmenta on Saturday September 05, 2020 @10:44AM
(#24383902)
Sure, I also pretended that IRC users were all US based... I could have taken a figure of 3b. instead of 3m.
Also was careful to state "stats are lazy and blunt"
Re:The User Always Loses
by chris-orgmenta on Saturday September 05, 2020 @09:02PM
(#24388107)
*300m
Is that true?
Peak IRC users appears to be 10 million (2013) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Decline, Citation needed.
Pretending that all IRC users were in the US... That's ~3% of the population.
Usenet is arguably going strong (daily volume has exploded but isn't a useful metric here though. Can't find active users from cursory look).
~70% of US population are 'active' users of Facebook. This counts people that have only used it once in the last 30 days. And it's not a dichotomy - I don't think people have an issue stepping outside of facebook, as long as there are no barriers to entry.
Just playing devil's advocate, I don't disagree with you in general. I appreciate that my stats are lazy and blunt, but it shows how relatively minuscule the usage of IRC & Usenet were 2 decades ago, and that while direct messaging might be in a more 'walled garden' state, traffic to self-federated content is generally still as attainable. Perhaps 'eternal september' has swung so far to the other side that the old non-internet users of the 90s have funnelled through AOL and out the other side to Facebook (and notably, it's easier to grab traffic from FB users than non-internet users), while the core tech demographic has remained 'in the middle'.