| IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice. IRC has a ton of advantages: 1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth. I used to use a 33K modem to speak to my friends after school. 2) Anyone can setup an IRC channel pretty much instantly on a server and you and your friends can start chatting. 3) The message protocol is quite easy to deal with and parse. It also really, really, really fast. Messages are instant, there is zero friction. Slack and Discord are very slow in comparison 4) Building a bots for IRC was super simple. You can be building a bot in minutes in any programming language. https://pythonspot.com/building-an-irc-bot/ 5) IIRC clients allowed you to write scripts to script the client itself. e.g. MIRC had a scripting language that was just plain text https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC_scripting_language 6) You could request files from server and bots IIRC. This was used quite a lot for warez back in the day and much faster than bit-torrent at the time. 7) It is pretty much anonymous. Make a nickname and connect to the server. 8) You can run your own IRC server pretty easily. You download the server software, config some XML/INI files and point your domain at the box. You have your own IRC server. |