5 ms·

Discord, overwhelmingly. Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump. It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only ho

Discord, overwhelmingly. Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump. It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only holdouts are people clinging to their CLIs and people objecting for ideological reasons. I wish it hadn't come to this, but IRC's just stagnated for too long. The barrier to entry's too high, using it on mobile devices is a chore, the feature set's extremely limited, etc. Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground and made some strides towards creating a modern user experience maybe two years ago, Discord wouldn't have had such a vulnerable market open for it to stroll in and snatch up. Discord provides seamless cloud message logging, mobile notifications, intuitive clients, a huge ecosystem of easy-to-use bots, and integration with games that just works without the user having to set anything up. Even non-gaming-related communities have been switching to it for convenience's sake.

kakarot 9y ago
I just wish this wasn't a battle of decentralization vs centralization. Discord seems cool and all but channel operators lack reasonable amount of ownership over their channels and Discord touches every message that comes through its network.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but do you mean ownership over Discord channels or Discord servers?
  - kakarot 9y ago
    I mean servers. The protocol is locked to the platform.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Unfortunately it seems to be an irreversible trend: Decentralized/federated services with many compatible client options are dying and being replaced by many competing and incompatible centralized services, each with few (or one) client options. It's like programmers are all constantly asking the question: "How can we make the Internet worse?" If E-mail were invented today, there would be 5+ competing protocols, owned by 5+ competing companies, you could only use clients written by those companies, and you wouldn't be able to send E-mail to someone on a different service than the one you were on. Kind of like the current text chat app cluster-fuck we have to live with.
blibble 9y ago
discord has also had $80 million dollars in funding an IRC network developed entirely by volunteers can't really compete with that sort of funding
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  What did Discord spend that money on? I'd wager that most of the value gained was in marketing.
  - dijit 9y ago
    Odd argument. I run an irc network. Quite a large one. My funding is less than 0.00001% of that. It doesn't take much to out compete monetarily. Even if a large amount of your total money goes to marketing.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> Discord, overwhelmingly. A community I'm a moderator of recently set up shop in Discordland, due to its superior user management stuff. Both I and another person independently the similarities to IRC; I said that we're re-inventing IRC practices from the ground up.
- reificator 9y ago
  But with rich previews, seamless device handoff, persistent messaging when offline, including notifications, and of course VOIP/Video on top. Now, you can get some of that in IRC via a bouncer, but it's nice to just have it baked in. Of course, it is a centralized system, with all the issues present there.
astrobe_ 9y ago
> The barrier to entry's too high I don't understand this statement. One finds IRC clients everywhere. One literally has to know just one command at the beginning: /join. And then if you Google "IRC commands" or something like that, you get the rest of them easily (if your client lacks in the help area). > the feature set's extremely limited I don't understand this mindset. Why should a program have an extra-large set of features? Is the value of a program measured by the number of features it has? > Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground and made some strides towards creating a modern user experience maybe two years ago, Discord wouldn't have had such a vulnerable market open for it to stroll in and snatch up Apples and oranges. Discord did have serious opponents named Teamspeak, Skype, Mumble and other VOIP clients - but certainly not IRC. And if my memory serves, the first thing they did was to make sure to dislodge those programs from the gamers community.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  I’ve been a software engineer for several years now and I still have trouble with MiRC and Adium. I tried Irssi and eventually gave up with it. The problem with IRC is that even the “simple” clients never just work. There’s always some little infuriating quirks that you have to dive super deep into configs to figure out if it’s even possible to resolve without some sort of PR to the repository.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Well, quassel for example doesn’t even have configs, everything is done in simple ways via the UI, and everyone, including the devs, uses that. It’s rocksolid, just works, and if you use the core/client split version, you can also connect a webinterface and mobile client to it.
  - YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
    These kinds of comments almost make me not want to live on this Earth any more.
    - astrobe_ 9y ago
jaequery 9y ago
I think Discord only hits the gaming community. What I liked about IRC was the diversity. I loved talking #basketball on Efnet, and so on.
Fjolsvith 9y ago
Does Discord provide easy collection of communications to the NSA?

kakarot 9y ago

I just wish this wasn't a battle of decentralization vs centralization. Discord seems cool and all but channel operators lack reasonable amount of ownership over their channels and Discord touches every message that comes through its network.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but do you mean ownership over Discord channels or Discord servers?
- kakarot 9y ago
  I mean servers. The protocol is locked to the platform.
ryandrake 9y ago
Unfortunately it seems to be an irreversible trend: Decentralized/federated services with many compatible client options are dying and being replaced by many competing and incompatible centralized services, each with few (or one) client options. It's like programmers are all constantly asking the question: "How can we make the Internet worse?" If E-mail were invented today, there would be 5+ competing protocols, owned by 5+ competing companies, you could only use clients written by those companies, and you wouldn't be able to send E-mail to someone on a different service than the one you were on. Kind of like the current text chat app cluster-fuck we have to live with.

blibble 9y ago

discord has also had $80 million dollars in funding an IRC network developed entirely by volunteers can't really compete with that sort of funding

pavel_lishin 9y ago
What did Discord spend that money on? I'd wager that most of the value gained was in marketing.
- dijit 9y ago
  Odd argument. I run an irc network. Quite a large one. My funding is less than 0.00001% of that. It doesn't take much to out compete monetarily. Even if a large amount of your total money goes to marketing.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

> Discord, overwhelmingly. A community I'm a moderator of recently set up shop in Discordland, due to its superior user management stuff. Both I and another person independently the similarities to IRC; I said that we're re-inventing IRC practices from the ground up.

reificator 9y ago
But with rich previews, seamless device handoff, persistent messaging when offline, including notifications, and of course VOIP/Video on top. Now, you can get some of that in IRC via a bouncer, but it's nice to just have it baked in. Of course, it is a centralized system, with all the issues present there.

astrobe_ 9y ago

> The barrier to entry's too high I don't understand this statement. One finds IRC clients everywhere. One literally has to know just one command at the beginning: /join. And then if you Google "IRC commands" or something like that, you get the rest of them easily (if your client lacks in the help area). > the feature set's extremely limited I don't understand this mindset. Why should a program have an extra-large set of features? Is the value of a program measured by the number of features it has? > Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground and made some strides towards creating a modern user experience maybe two years ago, Discord wouldn't have had such a vulnerable market open for it to stroll in and snatch up Apples and oranges. Discord did have serious opponents named Teamspeak, Skype, Mumble and other VOIP clients - but certainly not IRC. And if my memory serves, the first thing they did was to make sure to dislodge those programs from the gamers community.

SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
I’ve been a software engineer for several years now and I still have trouble with MiRC and Adium. I tried Irssi and eventually gave up with it. The problem with IRC is that even the “simple” clients never just work. There’s always some little infuriating quirks that you have to dive super deep into configs to figure out if it’s even possible to resolve without some sort of PR to the repository.
- kuschku 9y ago
  Well, quassel for example doesn’t even have configs, everything is done in simple ways via the UI, and everyone, including the devs, uses that. It’s rocksolid, just works, and if you use the core/client split version, you can also connect a webinterface and mobile client to it.
- YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago
  These kinds of comments almost make me not want to live on this Earth any more.
  - astrobe_ 9y ago

jaequery 9y ago

I think Discord only hits the gaming community. What I liked about IRC was the diversity. I loved talking #basketball on Efnet, and so on.

Fjolsvith 9y ago

Does Discord provide easy collection of communications to the NSA?