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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2025

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  • Honestly think a big part of it was cable tv and premium channels becoming big and needing unique content, which led to comedy specials and shows.

    The lack of comedy venues in most places except big cities around the US.

    The ability to play uncensored shows and filmed comedy performances made for great late night TV for HBO and Showtime.

    I think by the late 90’s- 2000’s the internet had stolen some of the spotlight and there were more comedy coming from improv groups and standup that landed TV deals. So that’s how we ended up with Reno 911, and shows like Chepelle, and Key and Peele. This was during the time that Mind Of Mencia was on. Comedy Central did a lot by just giving standup their own sketch type 30-60 min shows on prime time.

    I think a lot of the people in comedy these days have piloted from touring to doing things like live podcasts and whatnot. The straight standup routine isn’t seen nearly as much anymore. Plus a lot of content is just directed directly to YouTube and patreon channels because it’s easier and more profitable.


  • IRC was basically a persistent online text chat. You could have a community and because everyone accessed the internet via computers, people would leave their IRC client open and just have this chat server with different rooms running in the background.

    You could jump in and see what was happening. Today, discord serves the same function, but instead of having a client always connected, it uses an app that can push notifications to the user.

    The other big difference was that IRC was open, so you had many clients that could connect to servers, and they were available for many different platforms. Hell for a while I had an irc Client on my T-Mobile sidekick that used the old 2g pager network for data.

    Discord added a lot of quality of life features like easy attachments , images etc , but that comes at the cost of a closed network run by 1 company.