I have not used IRC, I was reading about it and I found that network an amazing idea, so what causes you to join IRC chats, what you used to gain out of it, and why you stopped using it?
The main reason I've stopped using it is because others have stopped using it in favor of more modern alternatives. One hand clapping doesn't make much noise and gets a little boring.
It was designed for use from a command line. Various client apps have tried to put a happy GUI face on it but you still need to drop to the command line on occasion.
It's like trying to convince people to use Linux on the desktop. Experience shows that less than 2% will ultimately do it.
I think IRC is way easier to automate. IRC bots are some of the easiest bots to write compared to any of the successor chat protocols or applications.
I still hang out in some channels but the ones I dropped out of were because everyone else dropped out of them. If there's no one to talk to then there's not much point to sticking around.
I am in several IRC channels using an XMPP transport. OpenStreetMap, Wikidata/Wikipedia and several other projects have public IRC channels and I am really glad they do, because more and more projects have started using walled gardens like Discord or Telegram for their communications.
It's really annoying that all these new projects are using Telegram. Discord I can handle, but Telegram is a pain to setup. I'm not gonna plug my phone number into some botnet.
The main reason I've stopped using it is because others have stopped using it in favor of more modern alternatives. One hand clapping doesn't make much noise and gets a little boring.
It was designed for use from a command line. Various client apps have tried to put a happy GUI face on it but you still need to drop to the command line on occasion.
It's like trying to convince people to use Linux on the desktop. Experience shows that less than 2% will ultimately do it.