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The integrations are a neat trick, but often end up spamming a channel where people are trying to communicate. Teams seamlessly works across platforms, and mob

The integrations are a neat trick, but often end up spamming a channel where people are trying to communicate. Teams seamlessly works across platforms, and mobile with video chat, files, outlook integration, and screen sharing. Maybe IRC could of been that, but it never happened.

lambdaba 5y ago
There are nice IRC clients out there. I don't use them and I haven't used them in a group, because even in programming language communities many have moved to Discord/Slack, but I would prefer working with multiple simple tools than a monolith, different tools for different uses, and glue them together when needed (it doesn't need to be complicated, and if it is, than some additional effort is justified)
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  If you look at these communities, there is basically only one feature of Discord/Slack that they use that IRC does not easily provide and that's ephemeral/mobile. If I go offline for an hour in IRC, I lose a bunch of messages unless I've done some backflips to set up some kind of archiving/replay in a separate failure domain (e.g. znc running on gcp). With chat services, the service is essentially znc for free. The rest of the shift is explained by discord being popular for other use cases (e.g. as a twitch companion), overwhelmingly dominated by younger users. IRC isn't getting new users and over time, this means the community will migrate due to turnover. Thank god we at least have things like matrix bridges, but discord is a lost cause.
  - lambdaba 5y ago
    I think the latter argument is 90% of the reason. Too bad this new generation doesn't have an opensource base of software to work with, or rather somehow didn't get acculturated to the existing one. Actually, that's probably because there were those few "killer features" such as offline messages that the existing systems didn't have.
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    There are web front-ends to IRC that can mitigate message loss without having to run bouncers. Convos [1] and TheLounge [2] come to mind but there are others [3] [1] - https://convos.chat/ https://convos.chat/ [2] - https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ [3] - https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_the_second_half_of_2021/ https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...
hiptobecubic 5y ago
It did happen, though. Just not in the same way. When it gets to the point where notifications are too spammy, it's very very easy to direct things to use a different channel and it works at huge scale. Anyone who uses IRC more than casually via some web portal is capable of being in more than one channel at a time. Google SRE still uses IRC internally specifically because it always just works and does what people need it to do. One of the downfalls of IRC is the notion that everything should happen in the chat. There's no reason you can't have a pastebin and a file server and screenshot sharing service, most of which don't matter anymore after 5 minutes anyway. It works really well and in fact, we kept using them after switching to fat chat because it was a better experience. There are reasons to want a fat chat client (primarily mobile, imo), but having used both for many years, the featureful chat client ends up being worse than just sharing links most of the time.
- igetspam 5y ago
  I find that the "fat" clients encourage bad behavior that IRC used to allow people to handle independently. Examples: * bot spam that I can't /ignore * "inviting" people to channels tht you can't opt out of (invite is slack terms is yank. there is not option to say no) * inline sharing of screenshots of article snippets that support an argument but not sharing links to the source material * so... many... channels...
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    > so... many... channels... To compound the problem of many channels the UI uses an insipid three column layout. I like to arrange chat windows, tail -f terminal windows, and other monitoring things in a "dashboard" layout in a workspace. That way it can update in the background and if I am curious about the state of something I can decide to context switch and bring up that workspace to get an update. I can then deal with an issue or go back to the task at hand. Slack and HipChat and all the other Electron-based attention siphons do not let me arrange their UI in a way that works for me. I hate notifications with the heat of a thousand suns and turn just about all of them off on all my devices. Slack et all hide the state of all but one channel by default and want to use notifications or stupid icons to show there's unread activity. It's the worst UI on the dumbest system but animated emojis!
laumars 5y ago
Teams is by far and away the worst UI of any chat system I’ve used. I get why it’s designed the way it is, it’s trying to be Sharepoint, Slack, Zoom and Outlook. And as a result it does every single one of them worse. Sometimes integration is better left as event handlers rather than trying to make IRC behave like a Wiki.
- trixie_ 5y ago
  Yea, but it works cross platform and on mobile. With the ability to carry voice connections from one to the other. Or even switch from wifi to mobile data without dropping. Even view people sharing their screen from mobile. For large teams and businesses I haven’t used anything better yet and we’ve gone through a lot over the years. Also Teams has met some strict Infosec reqs we need for mobile.
  - laumars 5y ago
    I cannot comment on the switching between WiFi and data aspect because I’ve not tried that myself (though it didn’t work on my MBP switching between Ethernet and WiFi) but everything else you’ve described is pretty standard features for video conferencing solutions these days. I’d like Teams more if it just focused on the video conferencing side of things. It’s chat and Sharepoint integration just adds more frustration than anything.
    - trixie_ 5y ago
      Seamlessly going from a chat about a problem, to a video meeting, to screen sharing, to sharing files, and then continuing the conversation on mobile, to scheduling a teams meeting later in the week to follow up and fully integrated into outlook is what I’m talking about.
      - laumars 5y ago
        Which is fine if your chat UI doesn’t totally suck for 99.9% of the other use cases. I’d readily take the additional pain of switching applications if it means I don’t have to deal with Teams for chat. Also all video conferencing and chat applications support sharing files. This isn’t some unheard of feature that Microsoft have pioneered. It’s been possible since the BBS days. It’s possible in XMPP and IRC. It’s possible in every other commercial service I’ve used. And I happen to think Teams does it the worst out of everyone of them because of the weird UI decisions and Sharepoint integration. Compare Slack to Teams and you see what I mean. Files are in lined in Slack and it’s easy to preview and work with them. It’s a pain in the arse in Teams. Slack also has all the other features of Teams that you’re boasting about. And Slack isn’t even perfect itself yet it still runs circulars around Teams in terms of usability. Literally the only thing Teams gets right is the way of marking the confidentiality of shared content. But that doesn’t justify the mess Microsoft have made of Teams UI. I’m not one of these FOSS evangelists who throws their toys out of the pram if we don’t use IRC. But Teams UI is really just a clusterfuck of bad design decisions. It’s easily the worst designed solution out there. Except maybe WebEx - which is a pretty fucking low bar, scraping the barrel really. Microsoft know they automatically win the enterprise because of AD and Office integration. So they don’t need to compete on quality. They just need to be present.

lambdaba 5y ago

There are nice IRC clients out there. I don't use them and I haven't used them in a group, because even in programming language communities many have moved to Discord/Slack, but I would prefer working with multiple simple tools than a monolith, different tools for different uses, and glue them together when needed (it doesn't need to be complicated, and if it is, than some additional effort is justified)

hiptobecubic 5y ago
If you look at these communities, there is basically only one feature of Discord/Slack that they use that IRC does not easily provide and that's ephemeral/mobile. If I go offline for an hour in IRC, I lose a bunch of messages unless I've done some backflips to set up some kind of archiving/replay in a separate failure domain (e.g. znc running on gcp). With chat services, the service is essentially znc for free. The rest of the shift is explained by discord being popular for other use cases (e.g. as a twitch companion), overwhelmingly dominated by younger users. IRC isn't getting new users and over time, this means the community will migrate due to turnover. Thank god we at least have things like matrix bridges, but discord is a lost cause.
- lambdaba 5y ago
  I think the latter argument is 90% of the reason. Too bad this new generation doesn't have an opensource base of software to work with, or rather somehow didn't get acculturated to the existing one. Actually, that's probably because there were those few "killer features" such as offline messages that the existing systems didn't have.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  There are web front-ends to IRC that can mitigate message loss without having to run bouncers. Convos [1] and TheLounge [2] come to mind but there are others [3] [1] - https://convos.chat/ https://convos.chat/ [2] - https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ [3] - https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_the_second_half_of_2021/ https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

hiptobecubic 5y ago

It did happen, though. Just not in the same way. When it gets to the point where notifications are too spammy, it's very very easy to direct things to use a different channel and it works at huge scale. Anyone who uses IRC more than casually via some web portal is capable of being in more than one channel at a time. Google SRE still uses IRC internally specifically because it always just works and does what people need it to do. One of the downfalls of IRC is the notion that everything should happen in the chat. There's no reason you can't have a pastebin and a file server and screenshot sharing service, most of which don't matter anymore after 5 minutes anyway. It works really well and in fact, we kept using them after switching to fat chat because it was a better experience. There are reasons to want a fat chat client (primarily mobile, imo), but having used both for many years, the featureful chat client ends up being worse than just sharing links most of the time.

igetspam 5y ago
I find that the "fat" clients encourage bad behavior that IRC used to allow people to handle independently. Examples: * bot spam that I can't /ignore * "inviting" people to channels tht you can't opt out of (invite is slack terms is yank. there is not option to say no) * inline sharing of screenshots of article snippets that support an argument but not sharing links to the source material * so... many... channels...
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > so... many... channels... To compound the problem of many channels the UI uses an insipid three column layout. I like to arrange chat windows, tail -f terminal windows, and other monitoring things in a "dashboard" layout in a workspace. That way it can update in the background and if I am curious about the state of something I can decide to context switch and bring up that workspace to get an update. I can then deal with an issue or go back to the task at hand. Slack and HipChat and all the other Electron-based attention siphons do not let me arrange their UI in a way that works for me. I hate notifications with the heat of a thousand suns and turn just about all of them off on all my devices. Slack et all hide the state of all but one channel by default and want to use notifications or stupid icons to show there's unread activity. It's the worst UI on the dumbest system but animated emojis!

laumars 5y ago

Teams is by far and away the worst UI of any chat system I’ve used. I get why it’s designed the way it is, it’s trying to be Sharepoint, Slack, Zoom and Outlook. And as a result it does every single one of them worse. Sometimes integration is better left as event handlers rather than trying to make IRC behave like a Wiki.

trixie_ 5y ago
Yea, but it works cross platform and on mobile. With the ability to carry voice connections from one to the other. Or even switch from wifi to mobile data without dropping. Even view people sharing their screen from mobile. For large teams and businesses I haven’t used anything better yet and we’ve gone through a lot over the years. Also Teams has met some strict Infosec reqs we need for mobile.
- laumars 5y ago
  I cannot comment on the switching between WiFi and data aspect because I’ve not tried that myself (though it didn’t work on my MBP switching between Ethernet and WiFi) but everything else you’ve described is pretty standard features for video conferencing solutions these days. I’d like Teams more if it just focused on the video conferencing side of things. It’s chat and Sharepoint integration just adds more frustration than anything.
  - trixie_ 5y ago
    Seamlessly going from a chat about a problem, to a video meeting, to screen sharing, to sharing files, and then continuing the conversation on mobile, to scheduling a teams meeting later in the week to follow up and fully integrated into outlook is what I’m talking about.
    - laumars 5y ago
      Which is fine if your chat UI doesn’t totally suck for 99.9% of the other use cases. I’d readily take the additional pain of switching applications if it means I don’t have to deal with Teams for chat. Also all video conferencing and chat applications support sharing files. This isn’t some unheard of feature that Microsoft have pioneered. It’s been possible since the BBS days. It’s possible in XMPP and IRC. It’s possible in every other commercial service I’ve used. And I happen to think Teams does it the worst out of everyone of them because of the weird UI decisions and Sharepoint integration. Compare Slack to Teams and you see what I mean. Files are in lined in Slack and it’s easy to preview and work with them. It’s a pain in the arse in Teams. Slack also has all the other features of Teams that you’re boasting about. And Slack isn’t even perfect itself yet it still runs circulars around Teams in terms of usability. Literally the only thing Teams gets right is the way of marking the confidentiality of shared content. But that doesn’t justify the mess Microsoft have made of Teams UI. I’m not one of these FOSS evangelists who throws their toys out of the pram if we don’t use IRC. But Teams UI is really just a clusterfuck of bad design decisions. It’s easily the worst designed solution out there. Except maybe WebEx - which is a pretty fucking low bar, scraping the barrel really. Microsoft know they automatically win the enterprise because of AD and Office integration. So they don’t need to compete on quality. They just need to be present.