6 ms·

Indeed. My comment reached -4 quite rapidly, without a single rebuttal given. I say all of these things as someone that generally likes IRC. I have lots of goo

Indeed. My comment reached -4 quite rapidly, without a single rebuttal given. I say all of these things as someone that generally likes IRC. I have lots of good memories of it. But I also like plenty of other retro things, and the list of things that IRC does worse than everything else is long, objectively definable, and worst of all: ever-growing. Generally speaking, choosing IRC as your messaging tool is doing a disservice to both yourself and your users. There are better tools for nearly every use case.

welterde 4y ago
The initial version of your comment essentially stated that rebuttals are not welcome (still kinda does, since the stated goal is to avoid rehashing old discussions). But just to give you some kind of rebuttal (or mention some unmentioned points by you): IRC has native clients for many more operating systems than any alternatives (many don't even have any native clients at all!). IRC will still work when everything is very broken (DNS on fire, AWS having a moment, ..) and I think a fair few still use it for that reliability aspect. UX is very much in the eye of the beholder. Chatops is very much a thing in IRC as well as adding commands to it (just with ! instead of /).
- Karunamon 4y ago
  Yes, which is why I reworded it. The score continued to decline. Honestly, everything I've posted here is a list of facts. I'm more than willing to entertain being wrong on one or more of them, but as far as I can tell those facts are not actually in question. Regarding your edit, that could be seen as a benefit that IRC has, but right there with that would have to be "native clients" on the list of things that most people don't care about. The hatred of non-native packaged web apps is mostly a techie thing that doesn't exist outside of forums like HN. In a world where electron didn't exist, there would be a world with less platform support, not a world with more native apps.
  - welterde 4y ago
    I would actually still disagree a lot here, since a lot of the points you list under "Things every other modern messaging solution is better at:" for example is either things IRC has had forever (more fine-grained permissions and authentication; file transfers; abuse control and prevention; extensibility of all things.. nothing beats IRC here), that are really in the eye of the beholder (UX) or are things that not even most modern solutions have (threading; actual file sharing (good luck with large files); screen sharing) - some may have some subset of the features, but I don't think all of them have all of them. Fair point that the non-native apps are something people don't actively think or care about (even if it's the cause their battery is flat all the time). It's just personally I want to avoid applications that use a significant fraction of my ram and cpu just to display 10 lines of text.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      You'll have to note that the second part of the list is not just "things that that IRC doesn't have", it is "things that other stuff does better". You mentioned file transfers; when's the last time you tried to do anything with DCC? NATting makes that a nonstarter in 2022. What abuse control does IRC give you aside from the ability to block a user (or more accurately, block a host mask, which is probably not even accurate since most servers these days hide those)? Meanwhile over on Discord, I can set it so people can't even message me without adding me to a friends list and me accepting. If someone on IRC wants to make my session unusable, it is not all that hard to do and my options are severely limited. Discord and Slack and Teams all do threading, file sharing, screen sharing, and I'd be willing to bet that's the top three in the space. I'm not going to entertain the "actual" filesharing Scotsman, you drop the file onto the window and it is made available, which is good enough for most use cases. Not all or most are sharing multi-gigabyte database dumps. Hard disagree on extensibility. If I want to integrate with discord or slack I don't even have to maintain a client with associated state anymore, I can just provision /commands that callout to a web service. And yes, with modern tooling, I'd rather be speaking HTTP with all the niceties that come with that for free rather than blasting telnet messages over a socket. Hard disagree on permissions as well. Something like the permission hierarchy on Discord goes as far as command usage and who can even see a channel, and who can be directly notified, not just who can speak or who can kick other people. IRC is objectively more limited in that respect.

welterde 4y ago

The initial version of your comment essentially stated that rebuttals are not welcome (still kinda does, since the stated goal is to avoid rehashing old discussions). But just to give you some kind of rebuttal (or mention some unmentioned points by you): IRC has native clients for many more operating systems than any alternatives (many don't even have any native clients at all!). IRC will still work when everything is very broken (DNS on fire, AWS having a moment, ..) and I think a fair few still use it for that reliability aspect. UX is very much in the eye of the beholder. Chatops is very much a thing in IRC as well as adding commands to it (just with ! instead of /).

Karunamon 4y ago
Yes, which is why I reworded it. The score continued to decline. Honestly, everything I've posted here is a list of facts. I'm more than willing to entertain being wrong on one or more of them, but as far as I can tell those facts are not actually in question. Regarding your edit, that could be seen as a benefit that IRC has, but right there with that would have to be "native clients" on the list of things that most people don't care about. The hatred of non-native packaged web apps is mostly a techie thing that doesn't exist outside of forums like HN. In a world where electron didn't exist, there would be a world with less platform support, not a world with more native apps.
- welterde 4y ago
  I would actually still disagree a lot here, since a lot of the points you list under "Things every other modern messaging solution is better at:" for example is either things IRC has had forever (more fine-grained permissions and authentication; file transfers; abuse control and prevention; extensibility of all things.. nothing beats IRC here), that are really in the eye of the beholder (UX) or are things that not even most modern solutions have (threading; actual file sharing (good luck with large files); screen sharing) - some may have some subset of the features, but I don't think all of them have all of them. Fair point that the non-native apps are something people don't actively think or care about (even if it's the cause their battery is flat all the time). It's just personally I want to avoid applications that use a significant fraction of my ram and cpu just to display 10 lines of text.
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    You'll have to note that the second part of the list is not just "things that that IRC doesn't have", it is "things that other stuff does better". You mentioned file transfers; when's the last time you tried to do anything with DCC? NATting makes that a nonstarter in 2022. What abuse control does IRC give you aside from the ability to block a user (or more accurately, block a host mask, which is probably not even accurate since most servers these days hide those)? Meanwhile over on Discord, I can set it so people can't even message me without adding me to a friends list and me accepting. If someone on IRC wants to make my session unusable, it is not all that hard to do and my options are severely limited. Discord and Slack and Teams all do threading, file sharing, screen sharing, and I'd be willing to bet that's the top three in the space. I'm not going to entertain the "actual" filesharing Scotsman, you drop the file onto the window and it is made available, which is good enough for most use cases. Not all or most are sharing multi-gigabyte database dumps. Hard disagree on extensibility. If I want to integrate with discord or slack I don't even have to maintain a client with associated state anymore, I can just provision /commands that callout to a web service. And yes, with modern tooling, I'd rather be speaking HTTP with all the niceties that come with that for free rather than blasting telnet messages over a socket. Hard disagree on permissions as well. Something like the permission hierarchy on Discord goes as far as command usage and who can even see a channel, and who can be directly notified, not just who can speak or who can kick other people. IRC is objectively more limited in that respect.