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They aren't identical, but the grandparent's argument wasn't dependent on the premise that they are. You simply can't argue there wasn't a solid history predat

• Karunamon 11y ago
  I'm not sure there's another way to read "IRC channels never existed then" that isn't a comparison between IRC and hashtags... Sure, there's a superficial resemblance inasmuch as a channel and a hashtag are words prefixed by a #, but that is where the similarities end. The reason open standards for communication are in decline is because nobody uses them when technically better alternatives exist. Pretty much all of Hipchat/Slack's marketing copy is a laundry list of things that IRC simply cannot do without either hacky workarounds, or at all because the protocol doesn't support it. (rant mode) Remember that vaguely-disparaging comment here when Dropbox was announced, about how you could set up the same thing with some scripts and VCS repo? We're nerds, that's fine. We're perfectly okay with getting our hands dirty. Nobody else wants to do that when there's a much simpler alternative. Including nerds, because there's a lot better way to spend our time than reinventing, the hard way, something that someone else already did. There is a need, IMO, for a nonprofit foundation that makes things like Dropbox, Hipchat, etc. but more importantly, makes them with polish, and speaking as an engineer of sorts, that means that it can't be designed by engineers. It needs to be designed to solve problems that actual users have in the way that actual users work If you have to do things like edit .conf files, twiddle services, and so forth, you've already lost. That's plenty sysadmin friendly, but krptonite to users.
  • lotyrin 11y ago
    I think you might misunderstand my comments. I don't think you and I disagree much. You seem to be reading a lot into my comment and the grandparent's, I'm not sure what agenda you might suppose we have. I don't intend to point out the (sure, we can call it superficial) use of # to denote a topic to decry Twitter in any way or glorify IRC. It's pretty devoid of any kind of emotional investment. I'm not saying Twitter really owes anything to IRC, or that IRC is somehow a superior Twitter or even resembles it at all, nor do I think the grandparent did. I'm not saying that # denoting a topic is very profound. I'm not saying that existing open/distributed/standard services that exist are obviously superior to the closed/centralized/proprietary ones that exist (in most cases it's pretty obviously not true). Nor did I even espouse the opinion in this thread that given two theoretical services which are equal but that one is open/distributed/standardized and the other is closed/centralized/proprietary that the former is superior (that was the grandparent). That said, I do hold that opinion for reasons I feel are pretty self-evident. If we all communicate on fragmented channels that are owned by people with interests other than facilitating our communication, we aren't in very good hands, we miss out on lots of opportunities to communicate (there are friends I've fallen out of touch with because I've lost track of which instant messaging protocol they are most likely to respond on, I think most of us have some of these). Communication apps and protocols and services backed by commercial interests will of course have better invested in user experience. Admittedly, user experience is a higher priority of mine than openness, so I use Slack and Hangouts and Skype like anyone. I'm not going to judge anyone for their choices here. I'm just not going to ignore the fact that in making that choice, I'm giving up something.