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Probably the reason that took over is they are well funded and have marketing and/or salespeople. And they have emojis, file uploads, etc and they are just gene

Probably the reason that took over is they are well funded and have marketing and/or salespeople. And they have emojis, file uploads, etc and they are just generally easier to use. Not that IRC is hard, but it is geeky enough.

bsder 3y ago
> Not that IRC is hard This totally understates the idiocy of IRC. I was a full-blown operator/system administrator across both mainframes and Unix workstations for years. And I never truly felt like I grokked IRC. Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc. And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b." Sorry, I weep for the centralization of these kinds of services. I don't weep even in the slightest for how IRC actually got implemented.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  Yeah, I really don't get how people feel like IRC is somehow the pinnacle of chat. Even if you think a lot of the features added by newer applications and protocols are unnecessary or even a negative, it's really hard to argue that IRC isn't a patchwork of incredible cruft built on top of something so barebones that it just did not survive contact with reality.
  - oblio 3y ago
    Plenty of techies love idealized versions of open protocols, even horrible ones like FTP. Similar story for ubiquitous tools. Shell is a horrible tool with a few lucky features (pipes, focus on text) that's everywhere so it wins by default. And techies turn a blind eye to its million defects.
- TylerE 3y ago
  and of course authentication, when it existed involve, literlaly involved sending your password in plaintext to some user you _hoped_ was the a system bot and not some impersonator.
- orhmeh09 3y ago
  > Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc. > And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b." These things have not really gone away on Discord. On the other hand, it's hard to choose the wrong client when there's only one you're allowed to use.

bsder 3y ago

> Not that IRC is hard This totally understates the idiocy of IRC. I was a full-blown operator/system administrator across both mainframes and Unix workstations for years. And I never truly felt like I grokked IRC. Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc. And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b." Sorry, I weep for the centralization of these kinds of services. I don't weep even in the slightest for how IRC actually got implemented.

rcxdude 3y ago
Yeah, I really don't get how people feel like IRC is somehow the pinnacle of chat. Even if you think a lot of the features added by newer applications and protocols are unnecessary or even a negative, it's really hard to argue that IRC isn't a patchwork of incredible cruft built on top of something so barebones that it just did not survive contact with reality.
- oblio 3y ago
  Plenty of techies love idealized versions of open protocols, even horrible ones like FTP. Similar story for ubiquitous tools. Shell is a horrible tool with a few lucky features (pipes, focus on text) that's everywhere so it wins by default. And techies turn a blind eye to its million defects.
TylerE 3y ago
and of course authentication, when it existed involve, literlaly involved sending your password in plaintext to some user you _hoped_ was the a system bot and not some impersonator.
orhmeh09 3y ago
> Whenever I had to go into a channel, it was always a screwy dance of mishmash of how to get a directory, how to appease the channel bot, how to even bloody just log in, etc. > And God help you if you didn't have the preferred client for the channel. "Bye bye, N00b." These things have not really gone away on Discord. On the other hand, it's hard to choose the wrong client when there's only one you're allowed to use.