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...and cue the thread about how IRC is a better medium and SAAS has ruined communication.
by ben174 5y ago
...and cue the thread about how IRC is a better medium and SAAS has ruined communication.
- SQueeeeeL 5y agoI feel like that's a pretty reactionary painting of the issue, but wanting large platforms to provide access through open protocols that have been in use for decades and have many accessibility and usability benefits really seems pretty much a no brainer for anyone reading Hackernews.
- iso1631 5y agoshould be But how to you get that $1b valuation by making yet another client based on open standards? You have to corner the market, and 90% of HN readership want to create or work for a new unicorn, not just improve technology for the sake of it.
- ctvo 5y ago> But how to you get that $1b valuation by making yet another client based on open standards? You have to corner the market, and 90% of HN readership want to create or work for a new unicorn, not just improve technology for the sake of it. Feel free to make a better Slack, that's more usable, more reliable, with more integrations, and run it on IRC. The implementation details mean little to users. Thinking Slack won because it was a closed standard and not that it's better than IRC for the majority of its users is quite the reach. Your colleague from marketing: - ... how do I get on it? - How do I upload files to a channel? - How do I search for something I wrote a month ago?
- Spivak 5y agoI just don't see why everyone doesn't just run their own always-online IRC bouncer and tweak their irssi config for hours to their liking to get an experience that's worse than Teams.
- arminiusreturns 5y agoSo while I often use irssi, I have become recently fixated on how to compartmentalize all my different chats and I keep coming back to weechat on a vps that bridges slack, discord etc, so weechat bridges are another alternative. If you have a good idempotent spinup method with your vps it can also mean less data hanging around to be grabbed because you can just make a fresh one anytime, in any datacenter.
- Trasmatta 5y agoI definitely prefer Slack over IRC for internal communication. But I've also kind of come to hate live chat for internal communication entirely...but email isn't a great alternative either. I'm beginning to think there are just irreducible complexities to human communication that make every platform non-ideal, and the best thing to do is to just set and manage expectations properly as a team and as individuals.
- stavros 5y agoZulip is a great alternative (hi Austin!).
- gjvc 5y agoSAAS / outsourcing has ruined organisation self-responsibility, but the MBA said it was a good idea, and the ill-informed CEO just followed.
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoIRC has existed for over 30 years and was widely popular for the big part of that timespan. Yet no one ever made it into or extended it into a realistic competitor to the modern wall garden proprietary chat platforms. Is there a fundamental issue with IRC that precludes that? Did no one just bother? Is it the specific mentality among its core users that "absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature" that lead to its demise?
- trasz 5y agoThere's no business model in IRC, and thus no marketing money.
- oblio 5y agoMoney. You can't make as much money with open protocols. Worst of all, it's very hard to pitch such a business to people who would fund you, so your business is outcompeted very early on. What users want and what entrepreneurs and investors want are two, largely uncorrelated, things.
- ferdowsi 5y agoIRC was never widely popular outside of a gamer/geek niche. At its peak, QuakeNet never broke 250,000 "users", many of which were bots.
- ben174 5y agoYou are so incredibly wrong about this, it saddens me.