Everybody had ICQ. You probably are too young to remember, but ICQ was as commonly used as Instagram today.

No it wasn't and it's not even close.

Definitely a regional thing. Where I grew up it was MSN Messenger all the way.

MSN Messenger was a bit after ICQ's peak

AOL instant messenger was bigger in USA, it was so big that AOL remained a major chat service even into the broadband years (though AIM clearly was under decline by that point)

My 90s and early 00s social circle was AIM, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.

Nah ICQ was pre AIM. AIM was popular with some people but ICQ was king for a while.

AIM was filled with script kiddies using spam to "hack" people's computers. It just crashed the app when they spammed you.

Then stuff like trillium came out which meant you didn't have to use AIM's awful client.

Funny, that's always the impression I had of ICQ back in the day...

Surely we can agree that no one's experience is universal, and both regional and subcultural differences are likely to have materially shaped our views of the various chat services in the '90s and early '00s...?

Surely we all recognize that our own experience is not The Default Everyone Should Understand?

do you mean Trillian, the software that offered a (very themable) frontend to AIM, ICQ, yahoo and (i think) at least 3 more chat services? the awesomeness of Trillian made it obvious how useless it is for so many different services to coexist while they all offer the same value. still true today

AIM was not around when I was using ICQ. Like, it literally didn’t exist.

Once it did my local social circle used it. Gaming stuff stayed on IRC and ICQ.

ICQ was released only 6 months before AIM, not that big of a difference. :D

I had AIM, ICQ, and a few others. Pidgin (originally GAIM) let you send and receive on all the services from one app, which was very handy.

By the time Pidgin existed I switched to something else. Maybe Jabber (today called XMPP). I don't quite remember though.

AIM and ICQ were the big ones back in the day, nothing ever was as big as that.

Pidgin also supported XMPP: it was a multi-protocol client. It was just a client, not a messaging system of its own. They'd abstracted the send/receive from the actual messages and built a bunch of backends that could handle pretty much any messaging protocol at the time.

ICQ was released 1996; Pidgin (as GAIM) was November 1998; Jabber was released in 1999. Those were good times.

Unfortunately Pidgin's XMPP support today remains stuck in the 90s.

> even into the broadband years

I suspect part of that is because not everyone had broadband. I was still on dialup years after broadband ISPs were widely available.

yes, I used AIM from 1999 until whenever it was shutdown (2017?) At several companies, we used AIM for what many use Slack for today. We even coordinated prod deployments in a private AIM chat room!

When ICQ was at its peak, users of any chat software were a rather thin layer of population. So "everybody" is more than exaggeration.

Obviously it was not a global "everyone" like today with WhatsApp. But I would guess that perhaps 20 out of 25 in my high school class was on ICQ back in 1999 or so. Most of us only had dial up, so we wouldn't be allowed to be online and block the phone for more than a 30 minutes or an hour per day.

Anyway, ICQ was not some elite hacker thing. Anyone with enough reading comprehension to tell milk and orange juice apart from reading a label could operate it just fine.

It was very popular, no argument about it, especially among then youngsters. But "everybody" blows it of proportion way too much.

>ICQ was not some elite hacker thing

Sure, exactly IRC was that hacker thing.

ICQ and AIM. Later, whatever the first Google one was. When it looked like ICQ or AIM.

ICQ numbers got into 9, 10 digits. For a late 90s internet population that was practically everybody.

This is type mismatch + incorrect assumptions. In 2001 ICQ went over 100 mln registered UINs. Which is not the same as "active users", it's all registrations from the inception (minus 10000 reserved). Losing UINs was a very common thing. Password recovery required email, which wasn't obligatory during registration, even if entered wasn't verified, back then few people knew what "password manager" is, and finally emails weren't particularly stable identity before gmail. But even if we would, for the sake of argument, assume the number as active users count, regular internet users by that time were numbered at more than half a billion. So even with absolutely unrealistically high estimation, ICQ share would be less than 20% of then internet population. And more realistic is probably 10-15%.

I signed up in 1997 and my UID was around 3.5 million. That's not a lot of people in the grand scheme of things

Oh. Misunderstanding. I thought I was replying to a comment about IRC.

I never had ICQ because I was opposed to replacing open internet protocols with proprietary walled gardens governed by unaccountable private corporations imposing clickwrap contracts of adhesion on helpless users.

ICQ was incredibly popular amongst “normies”, at least in Brazil. Much more so than amongst nerds who were mostly still on IRC.

In Denmark it was MSN Messenger, the nerds were on IRC and also had ICQ.

MSN, mIRC and all other forms of chatting and comms (like Orkut) were also highly popular in Brazil. I guess Brazilians just like to chat.

every single 'normie' i've seen use Discord can barely figure it out, they chase red badges across the UI all day and really have no clue about the paradigm at all.

They're there of course because some 'normie' thing of theres inevitably requires the sign-up of a discord for bonus game skins or some other such stupid shit, but the fact remains that they're clueless.

much like the average Outlook user, they're there because they were dragged into it by another element in their life (their job) and they really have no background or clue on how to use the piece of software, they just know they need to pretend and cite experience on the CV for a job.

Discord is incredibly noisy and information-dense and while maybe not for "normies", it’s definitely not just IT guys using it. Though I wonder how many people actually like to use it.

Discord is by far my favorite communication platform across anything I used in my entire life, nothing else comes even close in terms of feature set. It also helps that almost everyone I like is there. I'm forced to have whatsapp and telegram to communicate with the general population and I wouldn't use them if I didn't have to.

If someone from discord DM'd me wanting to move to telegram or whatsapp, they're automatically assumed to be a scammer.

Yes I just love its patronizingly cute little animations everywhere reminding me not to think too hard

I cannot believe this stupid app is so popular when you can't even monitor multiple servers at once! When every brother and their mother has a discord server but I can only look at one channel on one server at a time??

I haven't seen functionality to view multiple channels at the same time in any modern chat application, so I can't exactly blame discord for not having that.

Weechat does it: https://weechat.org/files/doc/stable/weechat_quickstart.en.h... I don't use this feature, though.

However I like that I can see all the channel with unread messages at once, and can switch between them quickly. On Discord if I'm chatting in three channels spread across two servers then switching takes two clicks.

mIRC, AIM, Trillian, MSN, Yahoo messenger, ICQ all had one chat per window and you could open as many as you want. IIRC (its been a while) mIRC let you tile multiple channels in the same window a la tmux

> Discord is by far my favorite communication platform across anything I used in my entire life, nothing else comes even close in terms of feature set.

It's just yahoo groups that requires your phone number.

Yahoo groups was better because it got indexed by search engines

In Discord’s…defense? Description? At least for understanding—it’s gamer chat. And it’s been that from the beginning. That’s the design and the intent, and while it seems Discord-the-company is trying to adapt Discord-the-product for the increase in popularity for other uses, its roots are showing. Navigating it feels similar to navigating the menu system of a AAA game.

Yeah, I know. But they seem hell bent on adding more and more distractions in every update. I mean, it felt more manageable when it was still just a gamer chat.

I've been using it since 2016, and none of the new features that I don't use have negatively impacted me.

Also using it since their first release, and all of the new features have impeded my usage. Server nicknames are fantastic but I couldn't tell you how to access that feature. I have to relearn where that option is every single time.

Nitro, Shop, and Quests. What are these even?

Even their changelog page is wtf (https://discord.com/tags/changelog)

Right click on the server icon or header, then per-server profile. Completely reasonable to me, and I don't think it has ever not been there since they introduced it.

Shop is where they sell customization stuff.

Quests let you earn currency you can use to buy customization stuff or nitro instead of real money.

I don't think there's a significantly better way to do whatever they are doing, and I don't see anything particularly objectionable about any of it.

Nitro is a subscription that gives you more customization for your profile (banners, themes, etc).

Shop is where you can buy additional customizations.

Quests get you exclusive unlocks for various games.

Discord is incredibly popular among younger people in general now. It escaped tech people containment years ago.

I can’t get into Discord. It’s just so messy and disorganized and too much information flying at my face.

I can't understand this, it's just a name and a message. It's slack with a better threading interface. (Which is just IRC with better file transfer and image previews)

We're you on IRC? Much more information dense.

It's the too much completely useless information flying at my face that I despise. So much empty space, the UI is so weirdly verbose for everything but the actual content. You need discord in full screen to manage reading messages properly. It's also slow switching channels and server.

Maybe I may officially old now, but I recall I could converse on IRC, not full screen, on a 800x600 15" monitor. Yes I know today we have tons of pictures and emojis and so we obviously need a bit more room. But common. Even slack takes slightly less room that discord for the same amount of information.

And yes, I enabled compact mode.

I am fine with slack (though my slack is also a disorganized mess) and used IRC at work for over a decade. Discord is at a different level with the different communities having super-duplicated functionality.

It's certainly dense with something. If it's information, it's not information I want though. I have no desire to know anything about their various Nitro sales or have a live feed to what my friends are playing or listening to. People I want to talk to are there, so I go there to talk to them. Anything outside of that just makes it noisy, like you said.

Is there any proof that normies would not be on board with it? Discord is information dense and huge among normies.

For the love of... can we stop saying 'normie', it's just so stupid. And intellectually lazy. And also dumb.

I’m surprised how popular Discord is for as “IT guy” and information dense the UI is tbh.

Shmer? It has so much padding and margin, even in "compact" mode. But it does have a lot of advertising all over, trying to get me to pay for stuff I don't intend to use. Maybe it's ad-dense?

I'm surprised and excited each time I manage to block a UI element successfully. Discord is usually quite preventing that for things that are meant to be noisy, like ads.

Hmm, I wonder if there's a subscription option for "Shaddup! I don't want to buy anything or do your quests!"?