If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Do you genuinely believe (1) IRC is anywhere near as usable as Twitter for the general population, or that (2) a real-time chat is an equivalent offering to Twitter?
EDIT: I should note that beyond being more usable than IRC, I have precious little good to say about Twitter.
So in a way IRC is better. If for no other reason because it required some personal discipline and will to learn to use and it segmented the internet to prevent these monstrous echo chambers. Humans aren't ready for a global forum. We are still only good at small communities.
Or they read an article about one twitter group bashing another twitter group and clicked on one of the tweets.
There's no path from toxic Twitter to constructive Twitter, but there are thousands of paths the other way.
Which can only mean that toxic twitter is where Twitter wants its users, so it seems like you're using twitter wrong in their view.
Of course there are worthwhile interactions to be made. But the people making them would have been doing so on the less accessible older internet anyways.
The news seems just as negative as social media.
Private DMs easily map to one-on-one privmsgs. Public replies and threads won't have an equivalent unless there was some meta-protocol to temporarily allow another person to talk in your channel + duplicate your posts in your channel to theirs + expire that access eventually.
Also subscribing to tags won't work without a similar "copy all messages from one channel to another" relay.
Someone should come up with a pub-sub distribute micro blogging service like how emails work.
fediverse: mastodon, pleroma, pixelfed
indieweb: https://indieweb.org/
twtxt: https://indieweb.org/twtxt
scuttlebutt https://scuttlebutt.nz/
hypercore https://hypercore-protocol.org/ (see iris.to for an implementation)
It still exists, it’s just harder and harder to find. For example, most of the tech blogs you see on HN are hosted on personal websites with no ads.
It's called NNTP
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...
Attempting to resurrect Usenet at any scale simply won't work. Even with a lessons-learned set of improvements (Usenet II), it went nowhere.
People say they want the old early-90s internet, but that internet only worked that way because almost nobody outside of universities was on it and nothing on it actually mattered to anybody.
It took me way too long to find the usage numbers (which ironically were within an arm's reach on my bookshelf most of the time), but ~1988 Usenet was under 1 million potential users, and fewer than 150,000 active readers. Even by the mid-1990s, it was under 1 million active participants.
Google+ was considered a failed social network with at least 10--100 million active users (by my own conservative estimates based on sampled profile data, independently verified by a much larger analysis). Facebook has 3 billion MAUs (monthly active users).
Until ~1992 (the Eternal September), Usenet users were largely represented as cohorts of a few hundred to low thousands, each subject to the disciplinary authority of university network administrators. Privileges could be and were revoked. Netadmins had a hardcopy directory in which everyone's number was listed twice (forward and reverse search). They talked to each other.
I'm active on Diaspora (for over a decade) and Mastodon (for about five years now). Both are far smaller than their comparable commercial equivalents (FB and Twitter, respectively). Each already strains under abuse, spam, and propaganda efforts, though Mastodon seems to have a more robust containment toolkit. Much resembles the old Usenet model: individual instance administrators can determine what users (locally or remotely) or instances (remote federation) can interact, and to what extent. It's high-touch, and has issues, but at present scale it mostly works. (Not perfectly, but it's not completely blown up yet either.)
Diaspora ... seems on far shakier grounds. User controls, admin engagement, reporting tools, and the culture of active management are all far weaker. The saving grace is the lack of algorithmic amplification, but bad actors are a distinct presence, if largely walled off into their own small, sad world.
Google closed it down because they realize they never needed it. You were rarely providing new information to google because you already had an account and they already were tracking you everywhere. Your posts on other social networking sites google knows about and uses. What sites you visit google knows about.
The only thing google+ gives google is your social graph. But not your friends/family social graph more of your professional social graph. I don't think there was a way to target that info through ads into more profit. They probably leveraged access to facebook's data for ads in exchange for shutting it down.
I sampled a random selection of ~50,000 profiles to find out how many were actually actively using the site.
9% of all profiles had ever posted anything at all to the site. This is somewhat fewer that 99.99%.
And only 0.016% of all G+ profiles had posted publicly in the first 18 days of 2015, when I performed my sampling.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq
And again, you're talking to the guy who ran that experiment.
Eric Enge of (then) Stone Temple Consulting independently replicated my analysis using a much larger sample of 500,000 profiles, confirming the results I'd found and providing additional details:
https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the...
I had absolutely no idea Enge was doing this until he published his results. They're a completely independent validation. Which is how science is supposed to work.
Your other comments about G+ are at best speculation, and largely fail to match my knowledge and understanding of the site and service.
Source?
> They probably leveraged access to facebook's data for ads in exchange for shutting it down.
Speculation?
As well as NNTP (mentioned in a sibling comment), listserves work for that (and don't just work like email, they use email.) And both have been around longer than the web.
When people say 'I miss IRC', they don't necessarily mean the technicalities of the protocol though.
So what? They're analogous not identical. The distinction you point out isn't relevant to the point of the analogy.
You wrote:
> switching to another network is literally as simple as pointing the client to a different domain name.
irc and http are the same in this respect, thus they are analogous.
I'd way rather have something that doesn't improve for 30 years than something that actively gets worse at a rapid clip.
That's an example of what corporate interests have brainwashed people into thinking. They didn't have to turn us against IRC. Most internet users don't even know it exists.
At one point it was easy enough for the average person to use, because the average person had to deal with a command-line. But tech, in its infinite quest to Make More Money, keeps chasing the dumbest of the dumb so that it can expand its market into an imagined infinity. It kinds of reminds me of the windshield repair shop that takes a baseball bat to nearby windshields at night to drive business
How about we work towards unwinding this whole mess and meet users in the middle??
FOSS and open protocols are criminally undervalued because of greed, and all the fake newbie empathy it generates
People have such a gap-filled view of the past. I barely had to learn any IRC command-line stuff because of mIRC
As for the chatbot craze? It was a craze. A fad.
IRC is an instant-messaging platform, while Twitter is a microblogging platform that was available to anyone in the pre-smartphone era as it was initially tailored for SMS message length.
IRC requires a client (okay, you could use a web gateway), and you somewhat need to know what you're doing (not saying it's hard, but the average user might not even care about accessing IRC if it requires a minimum of effort), while Twitter could be used through a flip-phone or accessed simply through a web browser, which you can assume everyone have.
99% of users just don't value the things you value in these services.
TBH: These days I prefer other venues though. E.g. HN, Slack and Facebook groups.
Just like the US does : https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/all-lies-how...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-saud...