IRC's one of the only things that makes me feel like the early web did. A bunch of mostly-anonymous people collaborating or just hanging out, and it doesn't seem like everyone's trying to make a buck or polish their "personal brand". Little or no official corporate presence. No one's worried anything they write will ruin their lives, justly or unjustly. It's the "no one knows you're a dog" web of yesteryear.
I miss when more of the web was like that. It's nice.
Well put. It is quite different now.
Re:IRC History by Jarkko Oikarinen
by TazeTSchnitzel on Friday February 27, 2015 @11:41AM
(#9119761)
This is also one of the (original) benefits of 4chan. It's not merely anonymous, but it is also ephemeral.
However, these days there are IRC loggers and 4chan archivers.
Re:IRC History by Jarkko Oikarinen
by vertex-four on Friday February 27, 2015 @11:48AM
(#9119810)
There's only IRC loggers that you can see, though - if you know (practically) everyone in a channel at a given point in time, you're reasonably safe - not 100%, but reasonably. Which is about good enough for most things.
You guys know that probably every third person on Freenode has his or her own IRC bot on the channel? ;). Ok, I'm exaggerating, but I'm yet to see a popular channel that isn't logged either publicly or privately.
Most channel bots log, and most channels have bots to provide application services (like history searching). I have 5 continuous years of history for some of the channel bots I run. There used to be a bot that would try and join every public channel and produced a web-searchable archive of transcripts, I don't know if this is still running.
Re:IRC History by Jarkko Oikarinen
by vertex-four on Friday February 27, 2015 @02:38PM
(#9120830)
Most channels I'm in don't have channel bots - one XKCD-related subchannel does (and it doesn't log), and the local hackspace's does (and it doesn't log either), but I'm in another half a dozen channels that don't.
In my use of it - primarily social, less technical - this is actually a huge benefit. Whereas things I say on Facebook, on Twitter, even on Skype groups float around forever, this doesn't happen on IRC.
Only the other people in the channel log things, and if someone else turns up, they don't see what I've been talking about - the exact contents of my discussions aren't floating about forever so long as people don't intentionally distribute them.