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Like Usenet, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was one of the most important early environments for bot development. IRC was a proto-chatroom – a place where users could interact, chat, and share files online. IRC emerged in 1988, nine years after Usenet first appeared, coded by Finnish computer researcher Jarkko Oikarinen. Oikarinen made the code open-source, enabling anyone with the technical know-how and desire to host an IRC server. Along with the code, Oikarinen also included guidelines for building an “automaton,” or an autonomous agent that could help provide services in IRC channels (Leonard, 1997, pp. 62–63).

The arc of bot usage and evolution in IRC is similar to that of Usenet. At first, bots played an infrastructural role; then, tech-savvy users began to entertain themselves by building their own bots for fun and nefarious users began using bots as a disruptive tool; in response, annoyed server runners and white-hat bot-builders in the community built new bots to solve the bot problems (Leonard, 1997; Ohno, 2018).

Just as with Usenet, early bots in IRC channels played an infrastructural role, helping with basic routine maintenance tasks. For instance, the initial design of IRC required at least one human user to be logged into a server (often called a “channel”) for it to be available to join. If no users were logged into an IRC server, the server would close and cease to exist. Eventually, “Eggdrop” bots were created to solve this problem. Users deployed these bots to stay logged into IRC servers at all times, keeping channels open even when all other human users were logged out (such as at night, when they were sleeping). Bots were easy to build in the IRC framework, and users thus quickly began designing other new bots with different purposes: bots that would say hello to newcomers in the chat, spellcheck typing, or allow an interface for users to play games like Jeopardy! or HuntTheWumpus in IRC.

Given the ease of developing bots in IRC and the technical skill of many early users, this environment was the perfect incubator for bot evolution. Good and bad IRC bots proliferated in the years to come. For example, Eggdrop bots became more useful, not only keeping IRC channels open when no human users were logged in but also managing permissions on IRC channels. On the malicious side, hackers and troublemakers, often working in groups, would use collidebots and clonebots to hijack IRC channels by knocking human users off of them, and annoybots began flooding channels with text, making normal conversation impossible (Abu Rajab et al., 2006; Leonard, 1997). In response, other users designed channel-protection bots to protect the IRC channels from annoybots. In IRC, bots were both heroic helpers and hacker villains – digital Lokis that played both roles. This dual nature of bots persists to this day on the modern internet on platforms like Reddit, where both play helpful and contested roles on the platform (Massanari, 2016).