I've made numerous friends over IRCs, Warcraft 3 chat channels and whatnot and had preferred it over face-to-face (and I still prefer chat over zoom calls!) but as I've gotten older, I started appreciating talking in real life more and more, and now struggle to form connections over chat. I wonder if there are others who are in the same boat.

You cannot compare an open chat, with a strong interest in a particular topic vs you team's Slack channel.

Online games work well, because you have a visual and full engagement.

Compare that to work communications... You are totally async on slack, it's just a simpler version of email at this point. Just because people are online in Slack today, doesn't mean that they'll respond within minutes.

If someone is online playing a game, you know that they're there. Old IRC was pretty much the same.

I get what you are saying but I seem to find it hard to engage with anyone, even my old friends, over chat these days. We end up hopping into voice chat when we want to catch up.

Once you have a solid foundation, text chat is almost as easy at maintaining that connection as in person conversation.

Making that solid foundation requires a lot of work though and not everyone has the communication (or empathy) skills to make it work.

Has worked for me, but I'm an outlier in that I grew up on IRC chatrooms before more rich-text and composite media communication methods were available.

Most people on this site in particular are likely to be outliers too: as the way we are communicating right now is as stripped down as possible and people will self-select for this.

I've also never had particular problems making connections over chat (I'm not old and not young); particularly in companies where I've had a chance to meet people in person even once or twice, I've found online communication no problem at all

Old person here, been using some form of chat since 1984 (The talk command on VMS).

You'll need a new theory. I've worked with two late millenial/gen-z developers who couldn't hold up a slack conversation to save their lives, so we went to zoom very quickly when they needed anything.

And I struggle to understand how can you make any real connections without seeing and hearing other person. There is so much communication hidden in body language and voice that for me any kind of text communication is just poor substitute. And I am not even extrovert that loves interaction with others (rather the opposite) and still know this intuitively to be true.