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30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.
by alexgmcm 7y ago
30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.
- YokoZar 7y agoAt least your friends don't need a whole lot of instruction to join. Inserting pictures is pretty easy. And it's mobile.
- downtide 7y agoStill with a lot of this tech, if someone sat you down for an hour and helped you, the barrier wouldn't be there.
- 0b0001 7y agoSitting down for an hour and talking about tech /is/ the barrier.
- downtide 7y agoI'm reading this as you'd prefer something inherently intuitive. Which yes would be great. Some tools need at least some instruction and guidance.
- elcomet 7y agoWell the point is that Whatsapp doesn't.
- downtide 7y agoI didn't see Whatsapp singled out in the article or by the parent. But good to know it has a simple UI. There is a comment in the story about cross platform woes and incompatibilities. I've never managed to install Whatsapp on my computer.
- 0b0001 7y agoYou don't /need/ to install it on your computer. Most users won't use it that way anyway, but if you want, you just use the web interface. That doesn't even require any riddles about adding another end-to-end encryption keypair.
- otachack 7y agoFor sure, it piggybacks off the mobile device you connect with. It's a really solid, seamless, and easy way of starting a desktop client. I wish Telegram would adapt it as well but the current way it handles isn't terrible (1 time code).
- skinnymuch 7y agoI think telegram should def add it as another way. But as a more power user of Telegram and Whatsapp I would def prefer native sleek clients for both. Whatsapp issues go beyond that like not being able to log into a tablet. But none of that goes away from the point of both being intuitive.
- downtide 7y agoAbout as intuitive as comic chat - seems you need a mobile and phone number to get going with Whatsapp.
- yoz-y 7y agoMany irc channels are as easy to join as clicking a link. Webchat has gone a long way now.
- chongli 7y agoThat doesn't solve the problem of name registration, file/picture sharing, group membership/moderation, customization/emoji, planning, etc. that are handled easily with something like Facebook Messenger groups. IRC is super clunky by comparison.
- qxcbr 7y agoNo emoji/pictures/link previews is a feature to me. You know if someone posts a link nobody's going to click.
- jamesgeck0 7y agoThere are other groups who heavily use these features. We've got over a thousand custom emojis in my Slack at work. Our interactions would be just slightly less rich without :badpokerface:, :sadpanda:, or :superhero:.
- astazangasta 7y agoBalls. Emoticons were plenty rich, they just require too much creativity for this lazy set.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoFor some reason these IRC vs X discussions always have the IRC party attributing character flaws to everyone else. Like not being creative enough to read the same amount of information from ":)" and specific, rich, custom emoji like, I don't know, someone simply shrugging. That's some bizarre self-aggrandizement. I encourage you to go on a Twitch channel and tell me the :) equivalent of all the custom Twitch/channel images you see in chat. https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/14/17335670/twitch-emotes-meaning-list-kappa-monkas-omegalul-pepe-trihard https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/14/17335670/twitch-emotes-mea... Could you break these down for us?
- Insanity 7y agoYou can use irccloud and you got irc on mobile, with easy picture integration and you don't miss messages when not online. (Like slack/discord).
- dmitriid 7y agoHN has a very strange hate/love relationship with modern chat systems. Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad. IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it.
- trampi 7y agouse The Lounge if you want to host something like that yourself, it is open source. I like it. https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/
- swiley 7y agoThis is probably because IRCCloud is not the one running the server the channel is hosted on; You don’t have to use it if your friends do. If that changed the average HN user’s attitude would probably change as well.
- xfitm3 7y agoIRCCloud's privacy policy should be of concern: "We keep logs of your IRC communications until you delete your account with us, or a connection, or channel. This means that, even if you stop using IRCCloud for a while, when you next log in, it will be as if you never went away."
- qxcbr 7y agoSo like any other messenger? You can delete your logs whenever you like, but they don't get deleted automatically.
- Fnoord 7y ago> HN has a very strange hate/love relationship with modern chat systems. > Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad. > IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it. Who exactly is "HN"? How did you even decide "HN" has opinion X or Y? I'm fine with Discord because its mostly used for gaming. Given the previous options (Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Mumble, Skype), it is miles better. And of these, only Mumble is fully FOSS. A clear disadvantage is however privacy-related, but for gaming that isn't a huge issue. What I'm not fine with is being forced to use Slack for work-related material. You don't want such sensitive data centralized. You want to host such yourself, or have the private keys yourself. IRCCloud, whatever it is, probably does not have the same amount of users as the previously mentioned two. But if it uses the IRC protocol (which the name suggests), at least that is open and there's no vendor lock-in like with Slack/Discord. Which, given that Slack is used for commercial endeavors, is worse for Slack.
- Crinus 7y agoI remember IRC in the late 90s, early 2000s having A LOT (like 9 out of 10) of people who otherwise had no idea about computers (remember droves of people disconnecting after 'Press Alt+F4 to get @'?). People who didn't knew the difference between a file and a directory (or folder) were on IRC with channels having hundreds of people. If someone can figure out Facebook (and trust me, Facebook is far from intuitive for someone who doesn't know) or any other web-based service, they can figure out IRC. The main reason people do not use IRC much nowadays is that other people moved off IRC to Facebook and other social places. It isn't a technical thing, it is mainly a social thing.
- fenwick67 7y agoYour point about Facebook is spot on, if you have never used it before it's a nightmare
- Fnoord 7y agoEspecially hardening all the default settings to more privacy minded ones.
- wlesieutre 7y agoLack of conversation persistence is a real problem. It's 2019 and people expect to have it. If messages disappear into the ether while I'm not actively connected to the room, it's not going to work for participating in a group conversation. Yeah you can set up some always-connected relay on a server and bounce your client through it to still get the conversation backlog when you weren't online, but it's not reasonable to expect an average computer user even have an always-connected machine to run it on, let alone actually get a relay working. If they can use Facebook they could use IRCCloud, but that's $5/month and Messenger/WhatsApp/Discord/Slack are free.
- nixpulvis 7y agoWell that's the whole idea behind Snapchat, but I get your point. Sometimes I wish I didn't have so many messages saved forever tho, honestly.
- chapium 7y agoAOL and mIRC didn't require any nongui commands as I recall.
- cowmoo728 7y agoYes but I currently have discord, hangouts, slack, line, and messenger installed, and have used keybase, signal, and matrix on top of that. It's a bit extreme.
- pcf 7y agoTry Franz to gather many of them in one program?
- skinnymuch 7y agoThe ram and random cpu usage spike on a Mac is too much for me to handle. I’ll never use Franz again after giving it multiple chances. There’s more native FBM options as well as Slack and Discord combined clients (Ripcord) though the latter might not look or behave the way people want.
- ggg2 7y agomIRC was probably as easy as slack. but you didn't have to force everyone to use mIRC. Same for aim, icq... greedy killed all of those, not the ability to create better open clients. Namely msn and gtalk (not the jabber offering, which was a joke attempt of making federated icq for corporations, enterprisey java codebase and all)
- dmitriid 7y ago> it's harder to discover channels. IRC never had any channel discovery, so how does modern breed of group chats make channel discovery harder? IRC does make a lot of things we now take for granted harder (file/image/video sharing, search, persistent history, mobile support...)
- philwelch 7y ago> IRC never had any channel discovery wot? It didn't have server discovery, but once you connected to a server, you could definitely discover channels.
- dmitriid 7y agoHow different is it from modern chats? The original claim was that "it's harder to discover channels." Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).
- ubercow13 7y agoThe article is about WhatsApp, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, etc. group chats. What you said is inapplicable to all of those.
- dmitriid 7y ago1. Those have all started as individual one-on-one chats. So, their roots show 2. There are many more “group chats” for the midern era. Ignoring them isn’t wise. 3. Even among those listed you have channel discovery, for example, in Facebook Messenger. And no, a discussion on modern chats does not end with “IRC was better end of story”. It wasn’t.
- Crinus 7y agoI remember back in the days of IRC being megapopular, a lot of servers would kick me out because they had too many channels and listing them triggered flood protection :-P
- andygates 7y agoChannel discovery feels like a feature here; safe intimacy is what the article is enjoying. Invitation only.
- ctvo 7y agoThere's more to a product than a protocol and foundational similarities. Whenever someone uses this to distract away from the success of Slack, for example, I question if they realize that UX, design, ease are all part of a product and can be independently innovated on.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoReminds me when you start working on a side project, get a PoC working on the weekend (like a to-be application/website that for now kinda works on the command line), and tell yourself "alright, the hard part is over!" Then you realize you only finished the 0.01%. That's about where IRC seemed to have stopped. "We're done. The clients can do the hard stuff that users actually want."
- falcolas 7y agoNaw, IRC was v1. It worked quite well, was well thought out, and standardized. Perfect? No. Good enough for the time and use-case? Yes. Slack and its kin are v2, capturing the requirements that have changed with the changing userbase. I only wish they were standardized, so we could have non-first party implementations (with the benefits that come with that).
- carlmr 7y agoIsn't mattermost an open source version of slack with most of the important features?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- javagram 7y agohttps://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/ does exist although i’m not sure how competitive it can be. It’s hard to see a future for IRC or something like it to beat the proprietary alternatives unfortunately.
- Reedx 7y agoThis is a common meme on HN, but it's reductionist to the point of being meaningless. You could also say Google reinvented Altavista.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoGoogle is an improvement on Altavista. Slack is a downgrade on IRC in everything except the lowest common denominator UX and pushing ops to someone else. The new SaaS companies integrate what used to be two (three) separate things - the client and the protocol (and the server). The way they do this forces everyone to use the common client that's not optimized for power users. Which is kind of nasty, because it's the power users that have to suffer the interface the most, as we use it day in, day out at our dayjobs.
- afiori 7y agoBut power users are a very small minority also, nobody argues that IRC should disappear but is still not a replacement for most other messaging platforms. I too would have liked an open protocol in principle, but looking at emails I am not sure it would have been a good thing. (As in eternal backwards compatibility and unchangeable architectural choices that might not suit a very different future use)
- jancsika 7y ago> 30 years later and we have reinvented IRC Are you saying these messengers have a feature that splits the group in half at random intervals? You should really submit a bug report to imessage and friends if they don't do that-- otherwise it degrades the reinvented IRC experience.
- ggggtez 7y agoI'm not actually convinced any of those things legitimately make internet communication better. Difficulty of finding channels is sort of the point isn't it? Exclusivity and tightly knit communities?
- afiori 7y agoMost other platforms have private groups. Or even private groups with moderation support.
- ProAm 7y agoSlack is IRC for millennials. Just reinventing the world.
- WilliamEdward 7y agoThis completely fails to capture the nuance in the differences between IRC and modern chat apps, as well as failing to understand an entire userbase and its needs. I know this because i'm a part of the userbase of both slack and IRC.
- 6c696e7578 7y agoIt's taken 30 years for someone to find a way to own the community around it. AOL sort of did this with their own DALnet software (AOL chatrooms). Amusingly, I couldn't see why slack stopped doing IRC, essentially that's what it was. The one and only thing that let IRC down was the message limitation. Some clients didn't make it very clear when those messages were not sent.
- imtringued 7y agoYes exactly. In what type of bubble does the author live? "Group Chats" predate the web. So how can they make the internet fun "again" when they have never stopped making it fun?
- PascLeRasc 7y agoIt's just a more fun and personal way to "be online" than regular Instagram/Facebook where there's the expectation of producing content and performing for your followers that you're living a good life, mixed with FOMO from others' posts. That's what group chats are being compared to. Bringing up IRC is a red herring since most people haven't heard of it and couldn't join if they wanted to.