[muuh-gnu]

IRC died for the same reason Usenet died: some old authoritative farts thumping on some ancient, bizarre rules they set during their youth, some kind of "trve" tech Islam, stopping any kind of progress and scaring away new blood.

They could enforce that kind of bizarro rules during the time IRC and Usenet were the only game in town, but everybody sane jumped off the moment remotely usable alternatives (anything web based like phpbb, shudder) appeared on the horizon.

So you cant really say that IRC and Usenet died some kind of natural death, they were simply slowly suffocated by the deranged "get off my lawn" incumbents.

[moe]

Well, except IRC isn't dead...

http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2012

[patrickg]

When I click through the years, I see its slow decay.

[moe]

Yes there has been some decay since 1998 (unsurprisingly), but in the past years it's been nowhere near as dramatic as it may seem at a glance - the charts are just difficult to compare due to the jumping scales and colors.

Freenode, for example, keeps growing steadily since 2007, many of the smaller networks show pretty much a flatline or cross-shift in the same timeframe.

As it stands the networks still serve ~500k daily users; seems a bit early to call it "dead".

[pnathan]

Strange, I thought I was using a very active set of channels this last weekend on freenode....

Had no clue IRC had died.

[roel_v]

This. My pet peeve of re: Usenet old farts: 'top vs bottom quoting'. I certainly don't long for the days where I had to wade through flame wars over stupid crap like that.

If there was some way to add ads to Usenet and IRC, we (well, 'they') wouldn't have had to re-invent it all poorly in the form of phpBB and its thousands similar packages, and various 'chat' or 'private messaging' apps and websites. What life could have been, if there was one good dedicated client that could handle all user messaging 'sites'...