this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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IRC is only text chat, Discord does a ton of other things on top.
Personally I've been on the internet for the last.. 27 years or so? I've used ICQ, Teamspeak, Skype, IRC, Mumble, Discord, Teams, .. (Probably forgot a few).
I never really liked IRC, yes, it's private servers which is nice, yes you can be relatively anonymous, but the channels were always a mess. Either too many people spamming so you can't follow a single conversation, or for most channels you had 40 people idling and never responding, so it felt like a ghost town.
Just in my personal experience Discord works a lot better and is far more convenient. But yeah, not much privacy there obviously (though everything you said in IRC was often saved away by a bot, so either way whatever you said was out there).
CashewNut slaps Vlyn around a bit with a large troutSure, but when everybody's Discord content vanishes behind a paywall, or makes you watch a 2 minute advert to see a Wiki, what are you going to do?
Already I can't just browse the content on a Discord community without "joining" and all that bollocks.
Like I'm sure Discord is better than IRC, but it's not better than a collection of open standards so anyone can run a server.
I've never seen someone host a wiki on Discord.. that's just stupid.
Having to join a server before you see its content is a good thing though. It's a privacy feature and also anti-spam / anti-bots (Before you see anything you often have to agree to the server rules).
Using Discord for information storage is obviously a bad idea. But for text chat including channels, voice chat and so on it's fantastic. Most games usually have an extra website with a wiki for information.
Joining to browse is in no way a good thing. Join to speak, yes. Join to read, no.
I think your view of servers here is wrong. They are literally named communities, as in private spaces. You get access if you're part of that community, otherwise you don't.
Discord servers are not public websites or a wiki anyone can access, they are not supposed to be.
IRC is a tiny bit more open, but even there you need to join a channel to read it and you can get kicked out. For reading the logs a bot saved away you might need an account too (but that's up to the server admin or whoever is hosting that content).
Issue with what you are saying is that I have seen a crap ton of software ( Foss software too ) using discord forums / discord I'm general as their "knowledge base" making it quite hard to find solutions for problems or ask questions, where in the past you'd be using a forum for.
Forums in the past always needed an account (with its own registration, accepting rules and so on) before you could ask your question. Hell, a lot of forums barely showed anything besides 2-3 topics and you needed to be logged in to see all areas (sometimes with extra user roles if you wanted to see more).
Exactly, you needed an account to ask and to view some download links, but google never took me to a forum that needed an account just to read my issue.
Duh, because Google wouldn't index forums where you need an account to read the posts. I've been signed up to dozens of forums back in the day, I'm telling you, a lot of them didn't show shit until you signed in. Google only shows you public posts, if the game forum needs an account you won't find the post in your search.
Most forums back then were heavily locked down, especially due to bots spamming ads.
How is this different to Discord? You have huge, medium and small channels in both.
Most IRC servers I've been to had exactly one channel for the entire community/topic where everyone hung out. Either way, IRC is dead, it's just fun how triggered some people get about it.
Far from dead and I have no idea which server you connected to but most servers definitely don't default to a single channel.
Your personal experience is biased as fuck because having to go through phone verification or downloading a sketchy proprietary client is in no way far more convenient than firing up irc
/me slaps Vlym about with a large trout.