I'll be tarred and feathered for saying this, but every time I see a modern chat app I pine for the days of ICQ (as it looked in the 90's).

It had a UI I prefer over anything since - compact, comparatively unobtrusive, information-dense, and fast. I could port my full chat history around with me between machines, and also search it reliably (no vanishing scrolling or lazy-loading handicaps). And it was handy you could advertise different presence states to different people/groups.

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Flere-Imsaho an hour ago | parent | next [-]

ICQ plus Winamp was peak PC

	▲	hurril an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Add mIRC 4.51 to that list. Fit a 1.44M diskette. Launched fully before you let go of the mouse button, on an old POS 486.

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bluebarbet an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>information-dense

In other words, designed by IT guys. And a reason (among many others) normies would never get on board. Not saying I disagree personally.

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purerandomness 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Everybody had ICQ. You probably are too young to remember, but ICQ was as commonly used as Instagram today.

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serf 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

every single 'normie' i've seen use Discord can barely figure it out, they chase red badges across the UI all day and really have no clue about the paradigm at all.

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.

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Sharlin 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Discord is incredibly noisy and information-dense and while maybe not for "normies", it’s definitely not just IT guys using it. Though I wonder how many people actually like to use it.

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cassianoleal an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

ICQ was incredibly popular amongst “normies”, at least in Brazil. Much more so than amongst nerds who were mostly still on IRC.

	▲	anothermoron 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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doublepg23 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m surprised how popular Discord is for as “IT guy” and information dense the UI is tbh.