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by peterwwillis 4797 days ago
It's also a machine that generates dumbed-down conversation. The natural slant on IRC is away from intelligent discourse and toward a cross between texting and one-line jokes with friends. There's nothing inherently wrong with this. But it does foster negativity much of the time.

I know hundreds of people who dedicate their lives to the drama and bullshit that is spawned solely by being in an IRC channel. If it went away, these people might just find something productive or positive to do with their lives.
3 comments
saraid216 4797 days ago
Yeah... I think you're hanging out with stupid people a bit overmuch.

You can say the same thing about SMS, Facebook, Twitter, IM in general, email in general, MUDs and MMOs, telephones, telegraphs...

Should all those go away, too?

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BCM43 4797 days ago
The natural slant on IRC is away from intelligent discourse and toward a cross between texting and one-line jokes with friends.

What? I could name 20 channels of the top of my head this is not true for.

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hderms 4797 days ago
tech-oriented channels? Care to name any?
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X-Istence 4797 days ago
Tech oriented indeed. You know, all of the Open source IRC channels on Freenode are a good start.

IRC is nothing like you've described, at least to me.

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peterwwillis 4796 days ago
IRC is nothing like you've described

User hderms didn't describe them, I did. And I can show you hundreds of thousands of channels like I describe, on most popular IRC networks (Freenode is a tiny network in comparison).

Also, I challenge you to show me proof of intelligent discourse in any Freenode channel. It's simply not easy, especially in a channel with 5 or more active participants in conversations. Try taking your time to make intelligent points and either people get bored with you or your points get lost in the scrollback.

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diakritikal 4797 days ago
Thousands of them actually http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?net=freenode
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diakritikal 4797 days ago
I think contributors to the many open software projects that both you and I depend on, that use IRC as a first class collaboration tool would strongly disagree with this point of view. I certainly do.
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