Also monks being the only ones who can read and write didn't stop religion to be popular in middle ages.

/s

C'mon

> That didn't stop IRC being popular in the 1990s.

IRC chats, especially in opensource projects channels, could and would be archived, published over the web and indexed by search engines.

So just like Discord then..

No

I wasn't aware that was being done.

Can you show me how to access the archives of the ask-for-help channel on the openllm Discord server? Right now they're discussing "loading models on CPU vs GPU". No matter how explicit I got, google did not find the discussion.

It's up to the server owners/admins to configure archiving, same as IRC.

In my experience, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an IRC log in a search result.

#haskell on Libra is publicly logged, but I couldn’t get Google to return a quoted phrase from a message a few weeks ago.

Many people on IRC don’t enjoy being in logged channels. I’ve also heard that there are GDPR implications to publicly logging people’s messages without their consent.

Discussion of the difficulty and downsides of IRC logging, from a coulple years ago:

=> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22892015

=> https://web.archive.org/web/20200417001532/https://echelog.c...

The HN blowback to developers choosing to use Discord is just wildly out of proportion.

No, it's not. If you work on an opensource / open development project, it totally makes sense to avoid walled gardens for the community chat/forum (a few years ago it was public Slack instance, nowadays it's Discord servers).

People didn't put documentation in IRC channels because they didn't want to answer the same questions over and over. Info went into a wiki, and you would get flamed for asking a question on IRC that was answered on the wiki. Discord is not a good place to stash documentation.

It's ok you get scolded for asking an FAQ in many Discord "servers" as well.