That's not a useful comparison. The fact that IRC existed in 1988 does not bring a user onboard in 2004.
That same argument didn't save WAIS, Fido, or Gopher. Nor did it keep Tymnet or Bitnet around and didn't give Compuserve and The Well a seat at the winners table.
It also wasn't a saving grace for Friendster, MySpace, or LiveJournal.
Magnavox putting out the first home gaming console in 1972 hasn't made them a gaming juggernaut nor does Xerox run the desktop. Neither Palm, Go or IBM makes my smartphone nor is my laptop by Grid Compass, desktop by MITS, spreadsheet by VisiOn or my pants from Arnold Constable. I don't fly Western Air Express, drive a Rickett, subscribe to RealNetworks Rhapsody for music nor am I posting this on slashdot.org.
Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy here.
The real question here is why didn't it die like everything else. Why is it one of the few legacy survivors?
> Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy here
Separate problems: getting off the ground versus surviving.
IRC got off the ground because it didn't have centralized competition with a capability advantage. Why it persisted is a deeper story. Lemmy is still trying to get off the ground. It, unlike IRC, does have such competition. As such, the old playbook is obsolete.
I'm going to disagree. The old playbook is to empower users in unique ways that at the time feel almost forbidden and magical and to competently execute that.
You could claim all those avenues have been explored but I disagree there as well. The surrounding context and possibilities are always on the move so the underlying potential is always changing.
That's why say, YouTube, the 40th or so on-demand video company, which happened to launch when digital cameras and broadband internet were becoming widely used, was the first successful execution or why smartphones didn't take off until the rollout of 3G or, looking into the future, VR might finally take off at attempt 50 after some related thing changes.
Text only, transient/short life data, is a lot cheaper to process and serve than images, permanent posts, etc.
It won the initial buy-in of us geeks/nerds/hackers/whateverthephraseofthedayis who gave it a rather solid base.
It’s a very personal type of communication. Real-time, immediate, and to a lot smaller audience (more intimate) compared to web forums, Reddit etc.
And finally, I would posit that it did actually die. What remains now is small, compared to how popular the likes of Reddit Twitter etc are, vs how popular IRC was in its heyday.
This is an interesting question. Wikipedia claims 230,000 users at peak times which is still quite a bit more than say, gopher. A 98% drop is real but you'll still see IRC occasionally for software purposes (like say, Debian)
Maybe it was a coalition of people there for different purposes and some of those groups have fallen away for different places.
For instance, people were doing dating and sextalk on irc back in the day along with file-sharing. Those applications have been superseded by many other places. I don't expect to see anyone sincerely asking "a/s/l?" in modern IRC chatrooms.
That same argument didn't save WAIS, Fido, or Gopher. Nor did it keep Tymnet or Bitnet around and didn't give Compuserve and The Well a seat at the winners table. It also wasn't a saving grace for Friendster, MySpace, or LiveJournal.
Magnavox putting out the first home gaming console in 1972 hasn't made them a gaming juggernaut nor does Xerox run the desktop. Neither Palm, Go or IBM makes my smartphone nor is my laptop by Grid Compass, desktop by MITS, spreadsheet by VisiOn or my pants from Arnold Constable. I don't fly Western Air Express, drive a Rickett, subscribe to RealNetworks Rhapsody for music nor am I posting this on slashdot.org.
Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy here.
The real question here is why didn't it die like everything else. Why is it one of the few legacy survivors?