Anyway, ICQ was not some elite hacker thing. Anyone with enough reading comprehension to tell milk and orange juice apart from reading a label could operate it just fine.
>ICQ was not some elite hacker thing
Sure, exactly IRC was that hacker thing.
My 90s and early 00s social circle was AIM, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.
AIM and ICQ were the big ones back in the day, nothing ever was as big as that.
ICQ was released 1996; Pidgin (as GAIM) was November 1998; Jabber was released in 1999. Those were good times.
AIM was filled with script kiddies using spam to "hack" people's computers. It just crashed the app when they spammed you.
Then stuff like trillium came out which meant you didn't have to use AIM's awful client.
Surely we can agree that no one's experience is universal, and both regional and subcultural differences are likely to have materially shaped our views of the various chat services in the '90s and early '00s...?
Surely we all recognize that our own experience is not The Default Everyone Should Understand?
I suspect part of that is because not everyone had broadband. I was still on dialup years after broadband ISPs were widely available.
Once it did my local social circle used it. Gaming stuff stayed on IRC and ICQ.
It's just yahoo groups that requires your phone number.
I cannot believe this stupid app is so popular when you can't even monitor multiple servers at once! When every brother and their mother has a discord server but I can only look at one channel on one server at a time??
However I like that I can see all the channel with unread messages at once, and can switch between them quickly. On Discord if I'm chatting in three channels spread across two servers then switching takes two clicks.
Nitro, Shop, and Quests. What are these even?
Even their changelog page is wtf (https://discord.com/tags/changelog)
Shop is where they sell customization stuff.
Quests let you earn currency you can use to buy customization stuff or nitro instead of real money.
I don't think there's a significantly better way to do whatever they are doing, and I don't see anything particularly objectionable about any of it.
Shop is where you can buy additional customizations.
Quests get you exclusive unlocks for various games.
Maybe I may officially old now, but I recall I could converse on IRC, not full screen, on a 800x600 15" monitor. Yes I know today we have tons of pictures and emojis and so we obviously need a bit more room. But common. Even slack takes slightly less room that discord for the same amount of information.
And yes, I enabled compact mode.
We're you on IRC? Much more information dense.
They're there of course because some 'normie' thing of theres inevitably requires the sign-up of a discord for bonus game skins or some other such stupid shit, but the fact remains that they're clueless.
much like the average Outlook user, they're there because they were dragged into it by another element in their life (their job) and they really have no background or clue on how to use the piece of software, they just know they need to pretend and cite experience on the CV for a job.