The thing with IRC is that noone ever used it as a reference. It’s the equivalent of a water cooler, no meeting minutes are made and people treat it as such.
Before google there was usenet and mailing lists and their archives and also forums. And web rings. There were index pages (how yahoo made its money) and, *shocker*, web search, in particular altavista. It might not have all been searchable but it was discoverable and you didn’t need an account much less an invitation to read a howto.
And frankly speaknig finding stuff on altavista back then was often easier than now on google, with all that SEO-infested garbage floating about and google ignoring advanced search syntax more often than it respects it.
Lol dude no. There was practically nothing online back then. I was around back then learning linux and programming. IRC was a great place to go otherwise you had to actually read books and RTFM. The wealth of information that we have today wasn’t even close back when alta vista was something you used. I had a job where I specifically had to search things and input data about it and there were like 5 different search engines offering all manner of different results. It was horrible.
IRC had massive amount of people and chatting with them was helpful. Discord offers that. Your beef is just that it’s not searchable and takes way more engagement for you to try and figure it out.
That’s just one place, but it’s very useful for a lot of people. IRC is still around and decent amounts still use it and have all along. Those communities that decide to be discord are probably so freakin niche that even if you just log in day 1 ask your question it probably gets answered in detail in 2 seconds.
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The thing with IRC is that noone ever used it as a reference. It’s the equivalent of a water cooler, no meeting minutes are made and people treat it as such.
Before google there was usenet and mailing lists and their archives and also forums. And web rings. There were index pages (how yahoo made its money) and, *shocker*, web search, in particular altavista. It might not have all been searchable but it was discoverable and you didn’t need an account much less an invitation to read a howto.
And frankly speaknig finding stuff on altavista back then was often easier than now on google, with all that SEO-infested garbage floating about and google ignoring advanced search syntax more often than it respects it.
Lol dude no. There was practically nothing online back then. I was around back then learning linux and programming. IRC was a great place to go otherwise you had to actually read books and RTFM. The wealth of information that we have today wasn’t even close back when alta vista was something you used. I had a job where I specifically had to search things and input data about it and there were like 5 different search engines offering all manner of different results. It was horrible.
IRC had massive amount of people and chatting with them was helpful. Discord offers that. Your beef is just that it’s not searchable and takes way more engagement for you to try and figure it out.
That’s just one place, but it’s very useful for a lot of people. IRC is still around and decent amounts still use it and have all along. Those communities that decide to be discord are probably so freakin niche that even if you just log in day 1 ask your question it probably gets answered in detail in 2 seconds.