Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 254 posts

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#21

Post by notzuck »

brylie wrote: post #10

I'm looking forward to when the onboarding process for IRC approaches the usability level of contemporary chat services such as Slack, Rocket Chat, Zulip, etc.

Slack is just too hard to understand. I still don't get it. I have to go to a webpage and enter a server / channel name. I have to create a password for each one, if I get approved it then takes me to a slack web client with no obvious way to open the chat in the app.

If you install the app on a different machine, you have to add everything again.

It's not a good user experience.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#25

Post by creshal »

• Support channels for various open source projects

• Fallback in case the new-fangled webshit breaks for the fifth time a month

• Old communities that see no point in moving to said often breaking webshit

But none of this has any growth potential, so we'll see for how long I'll keep using it.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#26

Post by tracker1 »

FreeNode seems to have some really active channels... outside of that, all I see on the servers I connect to now and then are a lot of lurkers.

The cool thing is, in general when I've exhausted my options, a lot of people deeply involved in various projects do tend to hang out in freenode's channels. I don't keep hexchat open all the time, just fallen out of habit, but I'll be in ##javascript and #csharp mostly, lately I've also been joining in on ##rust (though I have to manually enter as I'm blocked until after NickServ validation).

One key is to really keep one's expectations in check. You'll get a faster response in IRC than say a Github issue, but nobody is under any obligation to help you and it's good to be mindful of that and respectful.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#27

Post by dijit »

wayneftw wrote: post #17

I use IRC as a last resort since many of the regulars there are rude assholes.

Isn't this a bit like saying "many of the regulars on reddit are rude assholes" but you mostly see subs like r/inceltears or r/tumblrinaction ?

I think the community has a lot to do with it and each channel is often its own community and culture, even on the same server.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#28

Post by gogglehead »

brylie wrote: post #10

I'm looking forward to when the onboarding process for IRC approaches the usability level of contemporary chat services such as Slack, Rocket Chat, Zulip, etc.

Slack is just too hard to understand. I still don't get it. I have to go to a webpage and enter a server / channel name. I have to create a password for each one, if I get approved it then takes me to a slack web client with no obvious way to open the chat in the app. If you install the app on a different machine, you have to add everything again.

It's not a good user experience.

Re: Ask HN: Curious to know if people still use IRC?

#30

Post by rkangel »

gogglehead wrote: post #28
brylie wrote: post #10

I'm looking forward to when the onboarding process for IRC approaches the usability level of contemporary chat services such as Slack, Rocket Chat, Zulip, etc.

Slack is just too hard to understand. I still don't get it. I have to go to a webpage and enter a server / channel name. I have to create a password for each one, if I get approved it then takes me to a slack web client with no obvious way to open the chat in the app. If you install the app on a different machine, you have to add everything again. It's not a good user experience.

If you use the same email address, then I think Slack will not automatically log you in to all servers you're part of at the same time.
Post reply on HN