I find IRC's quite like that. I have found myself several times having deep private-msg conversations with people, and would in real life have grunted, nodded, offered a hug etc but been totally unsure how to express myself in the ASCII medium.
Yes. After you've said "*hugs*" for the tenth time running, you start to wonder in what way you're being any more help to your interlocutor than an IRC bot. Real-life hugs, nods and sympathetic looks seem a lot more difficult to overuse, as it were.
(Also I get a similar feeling when someone posts news of a Bad Thing on LJ. If told the same news in reality I wouldn't feel there was anything wrong with being the fifteenth person to hug them in sympathy, but I feel terribly unoriginal if I'm the fifteenth person to leave an LJ comment just saying "*hugs*". So instead I tend to prefix it with something like "This seems terribly unoriginal, but", which I'm unconvinced actually helps but it makes me feel slightly better...)
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(Also I get a similar feeling when someone posts news of a Bad Thing on LJ. If told the same news in reality I wouldn't feel there was anything wrong with being the fifteenth person to hug them in sympathy, but I feel terribly unoriginal if I'm the fifteenth person to leave an LJ comment just saying "*hugs*". So instead I tend to prefix it with something like "This seems terribly unoriginal, but", which I'm unconvinced actually helps but it makes me feel slightly better...)