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You've outed yourself as not knowing why IRC and email are the established media. IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversati

by davisr 2y ago

You've outed yourself as not knowing why IRC and email are the established media. IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. These are the only two protocols required to cover most all needs of communication. It's the simplicity and stability that is why they are preferred, and their usage translates to higher quality development -- much higher quality than is usually ever found on GitHub or Discord. Also, putting the keys to one's communication into proprietary platforms, like GitHub and Discord, is a horrifyingly bad idea. Maybe it helps graduates of computer science work faster, but graduates of computer science also are (usually) embarrassingly bad hacks at what they do.

duskwuff 2y ago
> IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. Is there a compelling reason for those to be separate, beyond "we've always done it this way"?
- davisr 2y ago
  Yes, because the live chat that happens on IRC is meant to be ephemeral. It's a place where you go to hang out with people, shoot the shit, or ask off-the-cuff things. Most IRC moderators have a no-logging policy because it's supposed to be a shared space that people "move into and out of". Email is where official business happens. That's where debug logs are pasted, and people can reply on a point-by-point basis, with quotes, references, and attachments. It's meant to be high quality/detail and searchable. That's why mailing lists have archives. When IRC and email aren't separate, you get Slack and Discord -- places that don't do either off-the-cuff chat, or searchable documentation, particularly well.
  - daedrdev 2y ago
    Discord in my experience is almost too good at off-the-cuff chatting.
daedrdev 2y ago
> and their usage translates to higher quality development -- much higher quality than is usually ever found on GitHub or Discord There are plenty of great software projects with development run using both discord and GitHub. The advantages are that it allows one to run both development and a grow a community, and more importantly it brings in massive numbers of young developers who will one day become important figures in a long term project. Simply ignoring where young developers are today is not a good idea imo. The tradeoffs you said are real, but the benefits I argue are real as well. And it's easy to make a discord bot to have all messages be duplicated in another application, such as irc, or record them.

by davisr 2y ago

duskwuff 2y ago

> IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. Is there a compelling reason for those to be separate, beyond "we've always done it this way"?

davisr 2y ago
Yes, because the live chat that happens on IRC is meant to be ephemeral. It's a place where you go to hang out with people, shoot the shit, or ask off-the-cuff things. Most IRC moderators have a no-logging policy because it's supposed to be a shared space that people "move into and out of". Email is where official business happens. That's where debug logs are pasted, and people can reply on a point-by-point basis, with quotes, references, and attachments. It's meant to be high quality/detail and searchable. That's why mailing lists have archives. When IRC and email aren't separate, you get Slack and Discord -- places that don't do either off-the-cuff chat, or searchable documentation, particularly well.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  Discord in my experience is almost too good at off-the-cuff chatting.

daedrdev 2y ago

> and their usage translates to higher quality development -- much higher quality than is usually ever found on GitHub or Discord There are plenty of great software projects with development run using both discord and GitHub. The advantages are that it allows one to run both development and a grow a community, and more importantly it brings in massive numbers of young developers who will one day become important figures in a long term project. Simply ignoring where young developers are today is not a good idea imo. The tradeoffs you said are real, but the benefits I argue are real as well. And it's easy to make a discord bot to have all messages be duplicated in another application, such as irc, or record them.