4 ms·

Freenode (IRC) can still be very good for a lot of topics and technologies, but it's slowly withering away now. Discord is where everyone is, but it's so awful

Freenode (IRC) can still be very good for a lot of topics and technologies, but it's slowly withering away now. Discord is where everyone is, but it's so awful just trying to ask a question I almost never get anything out of it. You ask a question and people talk over you and ignore it because it's too "hard". The only community on Discord I've found that's actually helpful is the Rust server. I love Rust.

test1235 6y ago
I'm on a few gamedev channels (SDL), and a few of the guys there are super helpful. I don't know what they get out of it, but they always take the time to answer other peoples questions, regardless of how nonsensical or rudimentary they may seem at first.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > I don't know what they get out of it I sometimes have a phase where I answer a couple of questions. Usually because at that time I have nothing better to do and get the enjoyment that I could spare someone else the frustration of figuring out something obscure by themselves, just like a random blog post or SO answer helped me with a problem. So I suggest to always respond with at least a little "Thanks!" or something if you found such answers helpful - it shows the other person that their contribution wasn't a waste of time and was kind of meaningful for at least one other user. Helps greatly with motivation.
echelon 6y ago
I see the same pattern. It's so sad. IRC used to be amazing, but nobody uses it anymore. It's attrition. People got older, had kids, or tech to them simply became a dispassionate job. They didn't have time for the community. Facebook brought lots of new people to the internet. The sorts of people we connected to online became less technical in aggregate, and we started spending more time on our computers talking to those folks and proportionally less time talking to domain expert nerds. It's zero sum. Everything became hyper commercial. If you're not making money, why do it? Why spend your time helping people build some other person's commercial product? The web turned into a proprietary monolith and stopped being cool. It turned into a job. Work at mature tech companies involve so much optimization of small product details that we grow tired of programming as a hobby and don't want to sit through more of it at home. Your coworker is just there for the same paycheck that you get and they're spending the evening zoning out and having fun. Why log onto IRC and chat about technical things when you have to come back and hear your coworkers talk about the great time they're having? The technical configurability of the past got glossed over with big shiny buttons and flat smartphone UI. It made configuring IRC clients lose its luster. We spend more time on our phones than our desktops or laptops now, anyway. The proprietary platforms have orders of magnitude more money to make chat look and feel polished. The new kids aren't learning it. It doesn't look like anything they're familiar with. It looks old and feels crude. There's nobody to carry the torch. As more people leave, there's less reason to stay. RIP, IRC.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  That's a rosy view of IRC but not a very accurate description of why people don't use it. In reality, people's UX standards improved and they weren't going to stick around with a crappy solution like IRC once chat rooms of the late 90s could even figure out how to show you old messages when you logged in. Something as simple as getting a notification while offline or reading what was said while you had your laptop lid closed are now things expected since over two decades ago. And they're things IRC is still missing unless you're a power user who gets to fix it only for yourself. IRC never evolved and never cared about UX. And it lost to efforts that did. That people on HN including you will use phrases like "shiny" and "bells and whistles" to refer to features like a chat that can show you messages you missed while the tram went through a tunnel for 30 seconds is sanctimony that killed IRC. It's like listening to an engineer struggle to come up with a single non-cynical reason why someone might like a GUI over a CLI. And then when GUIs take off and users finally get more options and stop using the engineer's CLI app, the engineer curses and shakes his fist at VC funding and proprietary tech and blames the users for falling for bells and whistles and being out of touch with the ideal form of software. (That's actually a far more accurate representation of IRC worship than I intended.)
  - progval 6y ago
    All these issues are already solved by some IRC clients, such as Quassel, The Lounge, or IRCCloud. Matrix clients such as Riot/Element as well, as they can access IRC.
  - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
    I grew up with IMs like Yahoo! Messenger and WLM. I tried to use IRC a few times when I was younger and found it impenetrable (a mosaic of text-only boxes that look like a mature emacs configuration -- way before I knew what emacs was -- and immediately greeted by a long wall of text telling me I had to do this and that to post in that server). My qualms and expectations are indeed very different. For example, fat clients like WLM were more peer to peer, which meant unlimited file transfers, sending voice clips, and uploading custom emotes all for free since they're not sitting on someone's data farming server. I miss that. Thin clients like Discord are of course more profitable but are more limited/onerous even as you're paying a subscription like Nitro to be able to bump up your file transfer to 100 MB and use custom emotes (despite the great UX). An older person's IRC is my WLM. xD
thetanil 6y ago
The python discord help channels are amazing. I want to take their bots and make them available for every language. The whole ask / answer workflow is soooo damn smooth.
- corobo 6y ago
  Oh you know a setup's going to be good when the discord has its own github group and website haha https://github.com/python-discord https://github.com/python-discord
trinix912 6y ago
I've been seeing the same pattern on Discord programming servers. Most of the questions are about absolute beginners not knowing how to configure their editor properly or forgetting a semicolon etc. While there's nothing bad with that, it's hard to ask more difficult questions. Most of the time your question just gets ignored. Sometimes you get totally off-topic replies like "just make an electron app it works everywhere" when asking a question about C++ GUI toolkits and so on.
DevX101 6y ago
Discord is great for building community, but the chat format isn't really great for general advice/Q&A. 80-90% of people will have some relatively basic question that should have one canonical answer. And the experts will quickly grow tired of answering the same question since chat interface isn't easily discoverable. This will lead to experts slowly abandoning the community. I haven't been on the Rust server but I'd guess that one reason it's useful is because your typical Rust developer already knows how to code and isn't a complete newbie. So you end up having conversation between seasoned developers who know how to read docs and can figure out basic syntax on their own.
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  What is this Rust server you speak of?
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    https://discord.gg/rust-lang https://discord.gg/rust-lang There is also a community run server but I don’t know its URL offhand.
shrimp_emoji 6y ago
Shout out to shepmaster
dgellow 6y ago
The Svelte Discord channel is great, I had nice discussions and exchanges there.
monroewalker 6y ago
Chiming in to say the the Reactiflux discord channel has been an amazing help while doing FE work with Typescript, React, Redux.

test1235 6y ago

I'm on a few gamedev channels (SDL), and a few of the guys there are super helpful. I don't know what they get out of it, but they always take the time to answer other peoples questions, regardless of how nonsensical or rudimentary they may seem at first.

alpaca128 6y ago
> I don't know what they get out of it I sometimes have a phase where I answer a couple of questions. Usually because at that time I have nothing better to do and get the enjoyment that I could spare someone else the frustration of figuring out something obscure by themselves, just like a random blog post or SO answer helped me with a problem. So I suggest to always respond with at least a little "Thanks!" or something if you found such answers helpful - it shows the other person that their contribution wasn't a waste of time and was kind of meaningful for at least one other user. Helps greatly with motivation.

echelon 6y ago

I see the same pattern. It's so sad. IRC used to be amazing, but nobody uses it anymore. It's attrition. People got older, had kids, or tech to them simply became a dispassionate job. They didn't have time for the community. Facebook brought lots of new people to the internet. The sorts of people we connected to online became less technical in aggregate, and we started spending more time on our computers talking to those folks and proportionally less time talking to domain expert nerds. It's zero sum. Everything became hyper commercial. If you're not making money, why do it? Why spend your time helping people build some other person's commercial product? The web turned into a proprietary monolith and stopped being cool. It turned into a job. Work at mature tech companies involve so much optimization of small product details that we grow tired of programming as a hobby and don't want to sit through more of it at home. Your coworker is just there for the same paycheck that you get and they're spending the evening zoning out and having fun. Why log onto IRC and chat about technical things when you have to come back and hear your coworkers talk about the great time they're having? The technical configurability of the past got glossed over with big shiny buttons and flat smartphone UI. It made configuring IRC clients lose its luster. We spend more time on our phones than our desktops or laptops now, anyway. The proprietary platforms have orders of magnitude more money to make chat look and feel polished. The new kids aren't learning it. It doesn't look like anything they're familiar with. It looks old and feels crude. There's nobody to carry the torch. As more people leave, there's less reason to stay. RIP, IRC.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
That's a rosy view of IRC but not a very accurate description of why people don't use it. In reality, people's UX standards improved and they weren't going to stick around with a crappy solution like IRC once chat rooms of the late 90s could even figure out how to show you old messages when you logged in. Something as simple as getting a notification while offline or reading what was said while you had your laptop lid closed are now things expected since over two decades ago. And they're things IRC is still missing unless you're a power user who gets to fix it only for yourself. IRC never evolved and never cared about UX. And it lost to efforts that did. That people on HN including you will use phrases like "shiny" and "bells and whistles" to refer to features like a chat that can show you messages you missed while the tram went through a tunnel for 30 seconds is sanctimony that killed IRC. It's like listening to an engineer struggle to come up with a single non-cynical reason why someone might like a GUI over a CLI. And then when GUIs take off and users finally get more options and stop using the engineer's CLI app, the engineer curses and shakes his fist at VC funding and proprietary tech and blames the users for falling for bells and whistles and being out of touch with the ideal form of software. (That's actually a far more accurate representation of IRC worship than I intended.)
- progval 6y ago
  All these issues are already solved by some IRC clients, such as Quassel, The Lounge, or IRCCloud. Matrix clients such as Riot/Element as well, as they can access IRC.
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  I grew up with IMs like Yahoo! Messenger and WLM. I tried to use IRC a few times when I was younger and found it impenetrable (a mosaic of text-only boxes that look like a mature emacs configuration -- way before I knew what emacs was -- and immediately greeted by a long wall of text telling me I had to do this and that to post in that server). My qualms and expectations are indeed very different. For example, fat clients like WLM were more peer to peer, which meant unlimited file transfers, sending voice clips, and uploading custom emotes all for free since they're not sitting on someone's data farming server. I miss that. Thin clients like Discord are of course more profitable but are more limited/onerous even as you're paying a subscription like Nitro to be able to bump up your file transfer to 100 MB and use custom emotes (despite the great UX). An older person's IRC is my WLM. xD

thetanil 6y ago

The python discord help channels are amazing. I want to take their bots and make them available for every language. The whole ask / answer workflow is soooo damn smooth.

corobo 6y ago
Oh you know a setup's going to be good when the discord has its own github group and website haha https://github.com/python-discord https://github.com/python-discord

trinix912 6y ago

I've been seeing the same pattern on Discord programming servers. Most of the questions are about absolute beginners not knowing how to configure their editor properly or forgetting a semicolon etc. While there's nothing bad with that, it's hard to ask more difficult questions. Most of the time your question just gets ignored. Sometimes you get totally off-topic replies like "just make an electron app it works everywhere" when asking a question about C++ GUI toolkits and so on.

DevX101 6y ago

Discord is great for building community, but the chat format isn't really great for general advice/Q&A. 80-90% of people will have some relatively basic question that should have one canonical answer. And the experts will quickly grow tired of answering the same question since chat interface isn't easily discoverable. This will lead to experts slowly abandoning the community. I haven't been on the Rust server but I'd guess that one reason it's useful is because your typical Rust developer already knows how to code and isn't a complete newbie. So you end up having conversation between seasoned developers who know how to read docs and can figure out basic syntax on their own.

kyawzazaw 6y ago
What is this Rust server you speak of?
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  https://discord.gg/rust-lang https://discord.gg/rust-lang There is also a community run server but I don’t know its URL offhand.

shrimp_emoji 6y ago

Shout out to shepmaster

dgellow 6y ago

The Svelte Discord channel is great, I had nice discussions and exchanges there.

monroewalker 6y ago

Chiming in to say the the Reactiflux discord channel has been an amazing help while doing FE work with Typescript, React, Redux.