5 ms·

All of the things you listed are true, and you and I and most other people on HN can respect why (at least to us) these reasons stand out from slack. But a midd

All of the things you listed are true, and you and I and most other people on HN can respect why (at least to us) these reasons stand out from slack. But a middle manager who doesn't even know what IRC stands for isn't going to want to learn the syntax for grep. They're not even going to know why they have to write \" instead of ". They want something where you can scroll up, and then your messages from two months ago are there. And that's what slack is.

oytis 7y ago
Yeah, but the original point was about FOSS projects. Just don't let managers into your FOSS project.
- packetlost 7y ago
  Don't let knowledge of old * nix tools be effectively gatekeeping people from joining a FOSS project. grep is not a sufficient replacement for indexed search with fields. Just try to use Discord's search feature, you can specify constraints extremely easily. The equivalent in grep (if you even have logs going back that far) would be some gnarly regex that you have to reference what characters you need to specify unless you're very familiar with regex. IRC isn't hard, but it has real shortcoming and real problems. The user experience hasn't meaningfully changed in 20+ years, but people's expectations and how they interact with chat platforms has. This is coming from someone who uses IRC every day, both at work and at home. What we really need is most of the features of Slack without it's terrible threading mechanism and no GIFs.
  - oytis 7y ago
    Well, my experience with Slack (never tried discord really) is that it's pretty hard to find anything that is more than a week old. Slack (and IRC) is designed to exchange the information quickly and forget about it. If we need traceability then e-mail is much superior to both.
    - DenseComet 7y ago
      Discord's search feature is beautifully from what I've experienced. I can search and get snippets from months and months ago almost instantly. Good search can be done with chat, it just tends to be hard.

oytis 7y ago

Yeah, but the original point was about FOSS projects. Just don't let managers into your FOSS project.

packetlost 7y ago
Don't let knowledge of old * nix tools be effectively gatekeeping people from joining a FOSS project. grep is not a sufficient replacement for indexed search with fields. Just try to use Discord's search feature, you can specify constraints extremely easily. The equivalent in grep (if you even have logs going back that far) would be some gnarly regex that you have to reference what characters you need to specify unless you're very familiar with regex. IRC isn't hard, but it has real shortcoming and real problems. The user experience hasn't meaningfully changed in 20+ years, but people's expectations and how they interact with chat platforms has. This is coming from someone who uses IRC every day, both at work and at home. What we really need is most of the features of Slack without it's terrible threading mechanism and no GIFs.
- oytis 7y ago
  Well, my experience with Slack (never tried discord really) is that it's pretty hard to find anything that is more than a week old. Slack (and IRC) is designed to exchange the information quickly and forget about it. If we need traceability then e-mail is much superior to both.
  - DenseComet 7y ago
    Discord's search feature is beautifully from what I've experienced. I can search and get snippets from months and months ago almost instantly. Good search can be done with chat, it just tends to be hard.