I miss the 1990s with IRC them days were unreal and so much fun. Today I think of it as a tool to get help and to help others and that is about it. Seems like channels get smaller every year except a few (Arch Linux and Ubuntu.
I'm interested in how/why a couple of the biggest channels on Freenode have been left out: #bitcoin-otc with 484 nicks and #bitcoin with 1179 nicks at the time of my post. What gives?
I'm not sure why you gave us a screenshot, rather than just typing out the network, and how many users it has on the channel. Feels like it'd be a lot less work! :)
Number of people on channel is in no way a good indicator of activity. There are very active channels with 2-4 people and totally unactive channels with even hundreds of people.
Yeah the number of people LOGGED in is totally different then active. I am always "logged" in just so I get to keep the cache of the dialogues. If one channel has 100 people you might be there all alone.
I can't speak for anyone else, but my personal IRC experience has simply gotten more private since the 90's. I still have an IRC client open whenever I'm on my computer, but these days I chat almost exclusively on private IRC channels and servers with people I've known for years. Instead of hordes of people swarming into large, public channels, it's a more intimate -- but just as genuine -- experience.
Still, though, that model seems unsustainable: fewer and fewer people are joining IRC channels or getting into what used to be a "scene." I think there will always be die-hards on IRC, but there's no longer the coolness that there was fifteen years ago.
I have the same experience. I have several group of friends where most people are on IRC 24/7. It makes us even more close to each other to be together all the time like this, and it is just an addition (we do not meet in person less often because of that). I think an important thing to note is that the majority of these friends are not computer scientists, engineers or anything that have to do with computers, but they still learned to use irssi or weechat and screen to join our IRC server :).
I guess the point of my comment is to say that maybe IRC use has changed, but it still is an effective and active communication tool that many people rely on daily, among which some have only known IRC the way I described it: as a communication tool for group of friends (maybe a bit like social networks).
I miss the 1990s with IRC them days were unreal and so much fun. Today I think of it as a tool to get help and to help others and that is about it. Seems like channels get smaller every year except a few (Arch Linux and Ubuntu.