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You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :) IRC has been around a l

You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :) IRC has been around a lot longer than most of the projects which have sprung up in the same space, and IRC views their features with skepticism rather than being the eternal trend-follower. If IRC had followed every trendy chat feature for the past 34 years then it would be a hulking monstrosity by now. There is wisdom in moderation. A communication method can be effective without facilitating every style of communication -- often moreso. I'll note that you're unable to embed a GIF or highlight code or send an emoji reaction on your Hacker News comments, but we seem to be having this conversation in relative ease despite that. Different people value different things. Matrix is there if you want a more "modern" option.

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corobo 4y ago
If IRC had followed every trendy chat feature it might not be 10x smaller than it was when I last used it too, in fairness Not even using comical exaggeration either, I'd say the user counts are pretty dead on 10x less now, give or take a few thou. Back then EFNet, Undernet, DALNet had like 100k users each. Barely getting over the 10k hump these days. > You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :) Notification settings aren't stuck in 1988 too, if you don't want to be pinged in 2022 that's on you :P
- carapace 4y ago
  It's not humanly possible to talk to 100k or 10k people anyway, so what does it matter? It's not Twitter. If the hundred or ten people you want to talk to are there, that's enough, eh?
  - corobo 4y ago
    I'm not saying they were all in one channel lmao What does it matter? If you go on IRC now every channel is idle, no chat, just joins quits and parts, boring, dead. > If the hundred or ten people you want to talk to are there, They're not, and haven't been in 10 years. I'd love to get back into IRC but there's no IRC to go back to.
    - rascul 4y ago
      > If you go on IRC now every channel is idle, no chat, just joins quits and parts, boring, dead. Not my experience at all. The channels I'm in have had a fairly stable number of users for at least the last decade. These are channels with hundreds or even thousands of users. There is lots of discussion in these channels every day. Sometimes so much I can't keep up with it if I'm there participating. I'm in mostly tech related channels, though.
    - welterde 4y ago
      Libera is still quite active, just hop on and onto your favorite programming language channels there (or science or news or ..) and chances are you'll see plenty of chat activity instead of only joins and quits.
throw10920 4y ago
> You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :) This is a false dichotomy between "you have to receive annoying pings" and "there's no notification system in your chat system". What actually happens in real life is that chat systems, even proprietary ones, give you control over what notifications you receive (and when you receive them). Discord, in particular, gives you significantly more fine-grained control than any FLOSS tool that I've ever seen.

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corobo 4y ago

If IRC had followed every trendy chat feature it might not be 10x smaller than it was when I last used it too, in fairness Not even using comical exaggeration either, I'd say the user counts are pretty dead on 10x less now, give or take a few thou. Back then EFNet, Undernet, DALNet had like 100k users each. Barely getting over the 10k hump these days. > You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :) Notification settings aren't stuck in 1988 too, if you don't want to be pinged in 2022 that's on you :P

carapace 4y ago
It's not humanly possible to talk to 100k or 10k people anyway, so what does it matter? It's not Twitter. If the hundred or ten people you want to talk to are there, that's enough, eh?
- corobo 4y ago
  I'm not saying they were all in one channel lmao What does it matter? If you go on IRC now every channel is idle, no chat, just joins quits and parts, boring, dead. > If the hundred or ten people you want to talk to are there, They're not, and haven't been in 10 years. I'd love to get back into IRC but there's no IRC to go back to.
  - rascul 4y ago
    > If you go on IRC now every channel is idle, no chat, just joins quits and parts, boring, dead. Not my experience at all. The channels I'm in have had a fairly stable number of users for at least the last decade. These are channels with hundreds or even thousands of users. There is lots of discussion in these channels every day. Sometimes so much I can't keep up with it if I'm there participating. I'm in mostly tech related channels, though.
  - welterde 4y ago
    Libera is still quite active, just hop on and onto your favorite programming language channels there (or science or news or ..) and chances are you'll see plenty of chat activity instead of only joins and quits.

throw10920 4y ago

> You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :) This is a false dichotomy between "you have to receive annoying pings" and "there's no notification system in your chat system". What actually happens in real life is that chat systems, even proprietary ones, give you control over what notifications you receive (and when you receive them). Discord, in particular, gives you significantly more fine-grained control than any FLOSS tool that I've ever seen.