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If any modern software company was given a spec sheet for Ventrilo (https://www.ventrilo.com/about.php https://www.ventrilo.com/about.php) and asked to develop

If any modern software company was given a spec sheet for Ventrilo (https://www.ventrilo.com/about.php https://www.ventrilo.com/about.php) and asked to develop it, you would get back a few hundred Mb installer that needed to download additional components, would send telemetry to their servers all day and check for updates, add background services to startup, and consume half a gig of ram while continuously managing to use a percent or two of your CPU at idle and probably even tapping the GPU to do god knows what. Meanwhile Ventrilo 3 has a 5.4 Meg installer, consumes 4 megs of RAM, and does none of those things. The newer bloated version has a 7.9 meg installer.

noduerme 3y ago
This is one of the luxuries of developing only in-house software for a business. You have none of the incentives to add consumerware bloat, and in exchange you get all that extra time to refactor and focus on making things svelte, performant, scalable, documented and concise. As much as any company is willing to load their customer-facing or retail software with a million kinds of garbage, that's the last thing they want in their own toolkit.
- sakjur 3y ago
  One of my personal career mottos is to focus on a secondary objective, as I’m miserable with all the mess going on around the primary objective. One of the things that inspired that was seeing how much better the mobile version of websites often were than their apps. Thinking about Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and similar. Their apps don’t have tabs, often drop state, and seem to occasionally focus on shiny over usable. My local newspaper prevents you from copying any text in the app. The mobile websites on the other hand tend to mostly have an annoying “our app provides a better experience” banner to bypass, otherwise they’re engineered to work, not push the envelope. They’re important enough for some resources, but it doesn’t seem like there is quite as much noise during the development for the ‘fallback version’. And I think that makes all the difference.
  - mostlysimilar 3y ago
    Highly dependent upon the app. Unfortunately the Instagram mobile website is atrocious. It's so bad I can only assume it's intentional on Meta's part because they'd rather drive us to their native app for tracking purposes.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fastball 3y ago
Ventrilo (client) also: 1. does not run on Linux 2. the macOS client is incompatible with many servers 3. has been in development for twenty-one (21!) years
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  It also has such a bad UX that few people use it anymore.
- ahoka 3y ago
  Everyone moved to Discord which does all the things the parent complains about, but somehow it’s still a better product. As if most people don’t really care about those, for the better or worse.
rtpg 3y ago
It should be noted that Ventrillo requires DirectX. This is part of where the "hundreds of megs" are hidden. Though honestly, crossplatform software too often just bundles Electron rather than relying on the entire OS layer (on Mac and Windows anyways) having all of this stuff built-in. For bugs and reproducibility it's nice, but it really sucks for "downloading the same bytes over and over again". This is downstream of OS vendors just historically not fixing bugs, but in an alternate universe people would have working OS stacks and we would use that.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  I’d much rather have to redownload the same bytes a few times than have the program I need not work on my OS.
pritambarhate 3y ago
Even after reading first 4 paragraphs of your about page, I don't have any idea what your software does.
- seaal 3y ago
  Should have kept scrolling to the massive bulleted list filled with features.
  - pritambarhate 3y ago
    ok, can you please explain in 2 sentences what the software is? Like MS Word is a software to compose documents, or KeePassXC is a password manager, for example. Is it too much to ask from an "About" page?
    - Epa095 3y ago
      Under the headline (all at the top, next to the logo) it says "Surround sound voice communication software". So fancy Skype ;-) But yeah, that page is not for people who have no clue! But maybe that's not that bad? Idk how many who comes to that page having no clue what that webpage is about, but I would guess a very tiny percentage. Maybe it makes sence to assume that the wast majority ending up there knows the basics already.
- dangerlibrary 3y ago
  Ventrilo is voice chatroom software (like discord) that is self-hostable. It's been around for 21 years, has a wikipedia page [0], and is mentioned in at least one old meme-worthy DOTA song [1], so the OP likely didn't feel it needed an introduction. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventrilo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventrilo [1] https://youtu.be/qTsaS1Tm-Ic?feature=shared https://youtu.be/qTsaS1Tm-Ic?feature=shared
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    I’ve never heard of it. Just looking at the website it looks like it hasn’t been updated in the last 20 years.
Ennea 3y ago
I didn't expect to see Ventrilo anywhere ever again after they've torpedoed themselves off the market when they've stopped distributing their server binaries and people could not self-host anymore.

noduerme 3y ago

This is one of the luxuries of developing only in-house software for a business. You have none of the incentives to add consumerware bloat, and in exchange you get all that extra time to refactor and focus on making things svelte, performant, scalable, documented and concise. As much as any company is willing to load their customer-facing or retail software with a million kinds of garbage, that's the last thing they want in their own toolkit.

sakjur 3y ago
One of my personal career mottos is to focus on a secondary objective, as I’m miserable with all the mess going on around the primary objective. One of the things that inspired that was seeing how much better the mobile version of websites often were than their apps. Thinking about Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and similar. Their apps don’t have tabs, often drop state, and seem to occasionally focus on shiny over usable. My local newspaper prevents you from copying any text in the app. The mobile websites on the other hand tend to mostly have an annoying “our app provides a better experience” banner to bypass, otherwise they’re engineered to work, not push the envelope. They’re important enough for some resources, but it doesn’t seem like there is quite as much noise during the development for the ‘fallback version’. And I think that makes all the difference.
- mostlysimilar 3y ago
  Highly dependent upon the app. Unfortunately the Instagram mobile website is atrocious. It's so bad I can only assume it's intentional on Meta's part because they'd rather drive us to their native app for tracking purposes.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

fastball 3y ago

Ventrilo (client) also: 1. does not run on Linux 2. the macOS client is incompatible with many servers 3. has been in development for twenty-one (21!) years

hombre_fatal 3y ago
It also has such a bad UX that few people use it anymore.
ahoka 3y ago
Everyone moved to Discord which does all the things the parent complains about, but somehow it’s still a better product. As if most people don’t really care about those, for the better or worse.

rtpg 3y ago

It should be noted that Ventrillo requires DirectX. This is part of where the "hundreds of megs" are hidden. Though honestly, crossplatform software too often just bundles Electron rather than relying on the entire OS layer (on Mac and Windows anyways) having all of this stuff built-in. For bugs and reproducibility it's nice, but it really sucks for "downloading the same bytes over and over again". This is downstream of OS vendors just historically not fixing bugs, but in an alternate universe people would have working OS stacks and we would use that.

Gigachad 3y ago
I’d much rather have to redownload the same bytes a few times than have the program I need not work on my OS.

pritambarhate 3y ago

Even after reading first 4 paragraphs of your about page, I don't have any idea what your software does.

seaal 3y ago
Should have kept scrolling to the massive bulleted list filled with features.
- pritambarhate 3y ago
  ok, can you please explain in 2 sentences what the software is? Like MS Word is a software to compose documents, or KeePassXC is a password manager, for example. Is it too much to ask from an "About" page?
  - Epa095 3y ago
    Under the headline (all at the top, next to the logo) it says "Surround sound voice communication software". So fancy Skype ;-) But yeah, that page is not for people who have no clue! But maybe that's not that bad? Idk how many who comes to that page having no clue what that webpage is about, but I would guess a very tiny percentage. Maybe it makes sence to assume that the wast majority ending up there knows the basics already.
dangerlibrary 3y ago
Ventrilo is voice chatroom software (like discord) that is self-hostable. It's been around for 21 years, has a wikipedia page [0], and is mentioned in at least one old meme-worthy DOTA song [1], so the OP likely didn't feel it needed an introduction. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventrilo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventrilo [1] https://youtu.be/qTsaS1Tm-Ic?feature=shared https://youtu.be/qTsaS1Tm-Ic?feature=shared
- Gigachad 3y ago
  I’ve never heard of it. Just looking at the website it looks like it hasn’t been updated in the last 20 years.

Ennea 3y ago

I didn't expect to see Ventrilo anywhere ever again after they've torpedoed themselves off the market when they've stopped distributing their server binaries and people could not self-host anymore.