The Illusion of Numbers in IRC Communities

Anyone who has managed an online community for many years will sooner or later come across a curious phenomenon. Whether it is IRC, a forum, a social platform, or any other online gathering place, someone eventually reaches the conclusion that the best way to attract new users is to make it look as if there are already many of them.

In the IRC world, this idea has taken different forms over time. Some people leave dozens of clients connected, some use bouncers and permanent connections in questionable numbers, and others simply try to increase the number of visible nicknames in a channel in the hope that this will be enough to make it look more interesting to someone joining for the first time.

The reasoning, at least in theory, is not entirely wrong. If a person sees two channels discussing the same topic, one with 15 users and another with 300, it is natural for their attention to be drawn to the one that appears larger. It is a psychological mechanism that exists everywhere. We see it on social networks, on websites, in online videos, and even in physical stores. People tend to associate numbers with success.

The problem is that this impression lasts for a very short time.

When a user enters a chat, they do not just look at the list of nicknames. After a few seconds, they observe what is happening, read the conversations, and try to understand whether there are actually real people behind those names taking part in the life of the channel. If they discover that the room is populated by hundreds of silent presences and that the same two or three users are always the only ones talking, the initial effect fades very quickly.

In fact, in some cases the result can be the exact opposite of what was intended. A channel that looks huge but is almost motionless often gives off a sense of artificiality. The user does not necessarily think that someone is cheating, but they sense that something does not add up. They see a crowded room where nobody speaks, and they end up feeling more lost than welcomed.

By contrast, it is surprising how alive a channel with much more modest numbers can feel. Over the years, we have seen rooms with only a few dozen users generate constant conversations, build lasting friendships, organize events, and maintain a steady presence over time. They did not need to look big because they were simply alive.

This is a difference that is often underestimated. A community is not the sum of the nicknames shown in a list. A community is made of the relationships that form between people, the discussions that arise spontaneously, and the ability to make someone feel part of something. These are things that cannot be simulated with a connection left open twenty-four hours a day.

Throughout the history of SimosNap, we have reflected on this phenomenon several times. For a while, we tried to deal with it in a rather strict way. It seemed to us to be a matter of fairness toward those founders who invested time and energy into building real communities, only to see others achieve apparently higher numbers through shortcuts that were not very transparent.

Over the years, however, we realized that the reality was less simple than it appeared.

Bouncers, for example, were not created to inflate statistics. Many users rely on them for entirely legitimate reasons. They make it possible to maintain a stable connection, avoid losing messages during disconnections, and access the chat from different devices while keeping an online presence. For part of the IRC community, they have been everyday tools for decades.

Applying overly strict rules against every form of permanent connection would inevitably have affected people who were not doing anything wrong. In the end, we realized that we were risking creating more problems than we were solving.

That is why today we prefer to look at the phenomenon with a certain amount of pragmatism. It is not a practice we are enthusiastic about, and we still consider it a shortcut with little long-term value, but we have learned that the cure can often be worse than the problem.

Because more than twenty years of experience have taught us a fairly simple lesson. The communities that stand the test of time are not the ones that manage to display the highest number of connected users at a given moment. They are the ones that manage to create an environment people want to return to the next day.

Someone joining a chat for the first time may certainly be intrigued by a high number of visible users. What will determine whether they stay or leave, however, is something else entirely. It will be the quality of the conversations, the willingness of other users to engage, the atmosphere inside the channel, and the feeling of having entered a place where real people exist, not simply statistics to show off.

For this reason, we have always believed that the growth of a community cannot be built artificially. Numbers can attract a glance. They can generate curiosity. They can even create a good first impression.

But no number, however large, can replace what truly makes a community feel alive.

People.

And fortunately, those are not so easy to fake.