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Just want to say that Discord and Slack do not solve the exact same problem as IRC. And here lies one of the most difficult aspects of protocols versus programs
by jerojero 4y ago
Just want to say that Discord and Slack do not solve the exact same problem as IRC. And here lies one of the most difficult aspects of protocols versus programs, protocols are much slower to adapt. Discord allows for a ton of functionalities that are not possible natively through IRC and it is a mistake to dismiss them.
On the other hand, discord and slack offer pretty much the same things that we already had with MSN messenger all the way back in 2008. Voice messages, image sharing, custom emotes, group chats, etc, etc. Although design lines have changed; client wise, I'm pretty sure you can make a discord clone that runs pretty similar in 2008 hardware. So it's not like I don't agree with the point you make here.
Processing and streaming video is, as you say, costly. And better hardware has helped a lot in this regard. Now a days it's possible to stream videogames. But this power that is now available to everyone is misused by most. Websites are bloated and they are dozens of megabytes on a lot of crap that doesn't really offer any tangible benefit to the end user. A lot of applications are slow and big, I think a lot of this problem comes from the culture fostered in the dev area where it's more important to ship new features than good features. In reality, managers care more about having lots of features shipped than for a developer to take a few days on just one feature so it performs well. Developers capable of doing both fast and good deployments are rare and this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
We should be spending much more time building performant tools that are easy to use, so that the heavy lifting is done where it needs to be. The idea of Electron is great, but the execution of it is bad; this is imo where the work should be done.
- tpmx 4y agoVideo is not in any way central to Slack. Slack solved a few key UX problems with IRC (history, search, centralized access control, team management). It could have been implemented on 90s hardware without any issues.
- _8ysf 4y agoWhat key problems do you mean? Does e.g. IRCv3 solve them?
- _8ysf 4y ago> Discord and Slack do not solve the exact same problem as IRC. [...] Voice messages, image sharing, custom emotes, group chats, etc, etc. Sure, but you could always share http links to images. IRC had private messages, too, and e.g. Matrix' group chats (or even private chats) are "rooms", i.e. IRC channels. Not sure how important custom emotes are, and you could share an http link to a meme. I don't think those are fundamental differences. Maybe it looks better if your images load in your Slack client (instead of having to open an http link), but that's cosmetic. Also a modern IRC client could load the images pointed by the http link, and even handle voice messages this way, couldn't it?
- lwansbrough 4y agoLoading random URLs isn’t a great idea no.
- _8ysf 4y agoBecause your Slack preview is not loading random URLs, I suppose?
- krageon 4y agoThe "ease" of slack and discord stimulate not understanding the underlying technology.
- hardware2win 4y agoDoesnt discord proxy or download it itself and then sends you their copy?
- jbverschoor 4y agoThere were many custom services and bots. It could really have an image download +preview transformer bot/middleware
- lovich 4y ago> Websites are bloated and they are dozens of megabytes on a lot of crap that doesn't really offer any tangible benefit to the end user. How many companies care about creating a tangible benefit for the end user? Tangible benefits for the end user are only valuable in opening a new market or defending existing market share. Once you’ve got enough market share and a sizeable moat, there’s no reason not to start shoving in features that are bad to neutral for your user, but provide value to the company. Hence every new service starting ad free and then adding an ad tier or increasing the number of ads once they are established
- bilekas 4y agoI'm so glad someone brought this up around IRC. As a protocol it's still solid and holds up. It also benefits from p20 functionality. As a stubborn user still today i always cringe a little when I hear that discord is just a better version of IRC.