Some found this threatening, but it was also very liberating for people in marginalized groups, who could exist online without judgment. However, back then, it was unlikely your IP was linked to your real-life personal info in a public way.īefore profile photos and centralized social media became common, you could easily choose an online persona and occupy it with a low risk of public repercussions. People could (and still can) see your IP address and guess your general geographic location. That anonymity wasn’t perfect, of course. In 1993, The New Yorker published a cartoon entitled, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” It became symbolic of the freedom of identity that came with online anonymity at the time. Web forums, instant messaging (like AIM), social media, SMS text messaging, collaborative services (like Slack and Discord), and even 3D worlds and games (like Second Life and Minecraft) have all contributed to IRC’s dive in popularity.Įven though IRC’s population is only a fraction of what it used to be, a core group of people who just want basic text chat are still on there chatting to this day.
Still, many people have abandoned IRC since the early ’00s due to the rise of the myriad competing online social spaces.
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Peak usage of IRC also coincided with peak use of the network to trade pirated software (“warez”), so not all of those people were using IRC to chat in the first place. However, the number of people using them has dropped dramatically ( some say 60 percent) from its peak around 2003-05. Today, there are still over 2,000 IRC servers and almost 500 IRC networks (groups of affiliated servers) operating worldwide. It allowed people from all over the world to share historic news, find romance, or talk about almost any topic with like-minded enthusiasts in real time. IRC started in Finland in 1988 and soon became an international internet sensation.
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With no centralized authority over who can host a server, people are free to switch servers at will or even start their own. IRC is a standard Internet protocol that allows people to run their own text-based chat servers with its own selection of channels organized by topic (for example, a channel called #music for talking about music).
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