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

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.