I've had the same problem, although IRC is so integral to my work and my life that it's not feasible for me to eliminate it. Most of the time it's infeasible for me to even log out for longer than a few hours during a normal day. I don't really have a reasoned essay about this, but a few thoughts are floating around.
- IRC, as both software and a communication standard, is utter garbage. I could write a post twenty pages long just cataloguing its obvious flaws. That makes it very difficult to implement any of these suggestions. It might be reasonable to do this with Jabber, but somebody would have to write a reasonable Jabber server in Twisted first.
- There should be a way to broadcast the temperature of an IRC discussion. Twisted is largely just random noise - I want to be able to minimize my IRC client without fear that I'm missing anything, until someone raises the "temperature" to alert everyone "an interesting discussion is happening, tune in now".
- In that vein, more discussions should be scheduled, rather than happening spontaneously. An automatic moderator bot could probably help with that.
- It should be a lot easier to fork off a political conversation into a new room. I can identify with the rage reaction to various IRC conversations.
- There should be some sort of "comforting social gesture" built in to the protocol so that you can greet people, thank them, and generally make polite noises without having to dress up as a cat, weaponize trout, chew off someone's arm, or wrestle them to the ground and lick their face. Those are all "normal" greetings I've seen otherwise normal and professional IRC users use to greet each other. In my experience, women who engage in this sort of thing tend to be inappropriately affectionate, but men tend to concoct extremely violent, bizarre and intricate rituals, sometimes with a defined back-and-forth that might be five or six steps.
World of Warcraft's emotes system achieves this by being really limiting, and thus far, from what I can see, that's a great thing. WoW players don't spend hours developing byzantine in-character rituals to greet each other - you have your option of /wave, /clap, or /bow.
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No matter how far #twisted gets, we always seem to come back to writing a MUD.
I've never heard it suggested as a way to simplify and improve goal-oriented social interactions before (I mean, for goals other than "I need some help with these three dragons and my complicated fictional love life").
#5 is ringing bells from old discourse analysis lectures now. Spoken greets and farewells tend to have well defined turns running to six steps or more: that might account for people be uncomfortable with the "just appearing and starting to talk" model that would seem sensible on IRC. But that doesn't account for people liking such weird ones.
As far as #3 goes, I keep hoping the 'virtual sprint' thing takes off a bit more because it has some of the same rationale.
Some of what you want from #2 and #4 seem to me to require a more formal structure, ie appointing some kind of group of clueful people who can signal "people interested in deferred cancellation, tune in now", and "you, you and you, I am placing you in #twisted-abortiondebate right now". Or were you envisaging something automated?
You could probably signal people interested in deferred cancellation by having them program their IRC clients to ring a bell on (?i:deferred.*cancel|cancel.*deferred). Maybe a really smart IRC client could include a Bayesian filter that trains on lines of chat you replied to.
I can think of several possible reasons people concoct elaborate and bizarre greeting rituals: because it's fun, in the same way that walking around at Burning Man wearing nothing but body paint and a weasel head is fun; because they're seeking ways of expressing affection without content; because it's easier to do it in text than in WoW or in the physical world; and because there are no pre-existing social constraints, such as a sense of personal space, preventing it.
I think the most important reason for these, though, is as a kind of social grooming --- contact without content. On IRC, it's more effective to squish someone, dance a traditional dance upon his head, and eat his shoulders, than to try to strike up a chat about the weather or a sports team. It's also more likely to bring a smile to his face.
I have a social group that occasionally employs similarly elaborate and personal-space-invading grooming rituals in meatspace. It does sometimes make new people feel alien, unfortunately, even though they aren't generally the subject of them.
I'm unconvinced that it's true that there aren't pre-existing social constraints online. If nothing else, I have a language relationship with people I love as well as a physical one, and if I see that co-opted (or coincidently occuring) as a "hey, we don't know each other but you are my smooshy wooshy love bug I wuv you wuvvie wuvvie, so, um who are you? welcome to our channel" -- that does ping pre-existing social constraints. I don't become a blank slate and reprogram myself when I go online.
It might be that I'm more of an exception on IRC than I am in real life. In my circles, casual and brief hugging is a social norm, but if you want to stay in people's physical space and randomly poke at them, you'll want to hope that they're attracted to you. On IRC as noted, things are different.
Finally, on the personal space invasion, one note, depending on the newcomers you're choosing: personal space invasion sometimes makes people unused to it fearful and repelled, rather than just making them feel a bit alien. I'm one such person. I hope you either do or can keep an eye out for us.
For some reason the extremely violent rituals don't bother me as much as the huggy wuggy crap. Is that because I'm male, or because I'm a sociopath?
The "more formal structure" option. The examples you suggest are almost exactly what I had in mind.
A chat room is more than just a collection of people; there is tons of implicit state associated with it. Users who are members of the community should have some power over making that state explicit.
That also implies that there should be more levels of permission on IRC than "an op" or "not an op". ChanServ is a band-aid on a brain tumor.
I'm not sure. It could just be that my group of friends self-selects and there is only a local correlation between being a sociopath and being male.
[quote]For some reason the extremely violent rituals don't bother me as much as the huggy wuggy crap. Is that because I'm male, or because I'm a sociopath?[/quote]
I've noticed that on Finnish-speaking IRC, this huggy wuggy crap only happens on two types of channels;
1) Channels with many girls, where it's mostly a girl thing.
2) Anime channels. Where female-dominated channels tend to be overall huggly wuggly and male-dominated channels more like the violent end of #twisted, with a sick twist.
On other channels there are often some rituals, but they are generally non-personal and related to some real-life thing - and if there's no real-life connection between users, there usually are no noticeable rituals, except in aforementioned cases.
The English-speaking IRC seems to somewhat similar, though the types of channels I'm on vary much less than on the Finnish side.
The IRC client that I use, ERC, can alert you to channel activity by keyword:
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki?ErcChannelTracking
I once abandoned an IRC channel in order to avoid some virtual flirtation that went on therein. I also used to take long breaks from #twisted in part to avoid the virtual violence, but it seems to have subsided recently...
The power to forcibly relocate people into an alternative channel like that sounds like a much more effective operation that the traditional "kick" operation. Ostracizing an individual is a heavy social decision, but redirecting them (along with their interlocutor) into an alternative forum could (with the right social context) be relatively painless.
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