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Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

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Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#21

Post by scblock »

polpo wrote: post #16

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring: Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point). Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screen…

Our group runs The Lounge, and at this point only a couple people use standalone clients any more (and one person with a Matrix bridge). It gives you all the above (except perhaps the company wide persistent history, I'm not sure) and it's still IRC.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#22

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

polpo wrote: post #16

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring: Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point). Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screen…

> Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app.

I've never had to do that and Discord or Slack aren't the right places for that anyway they should go in some knowledge repository like a wiki.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#23

Post by rickcarlino »

I use IRC regularly and will continue to do so, but I’ve changed my opinions in recent years to admit that it is only useful for power users. The spec maintainers went too long without supporting features of competing systems like authentication, history, Threaded discussion, and a whole bunch of other things. Many of these features have been added to v3 of the specification, but it is too little too late. It is absolutely absurd in 2024 to tell somebody to install a bouncer and host it on digital ocean. They are not going to do that, they are going to use Discord. With that being said, I still love IRC unlimited extensibility and simplicity. But I’m a software engineer.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#24

Post by ta1243 »

skilled wrote: post #4
LorenDB wrote: post #2

There's no point in overhauling IRC when Matrix is a much more modern alternative that includes E2EE and such things out of the box, no custom extensions required. Also IRC doesn't store message history, which is kinda a really important thing.

Shell sessions and bouncers sort of alleviate the history issue if that is what you really need. I always thought that not having history was part of the magic of IRC. That said, all your private messages as well as any messages in public channels can be logged and will persist on your PC until you delete them.

> Shell sessions and bouncers sort of alleviate the history issue

And that's why people don't use IRC

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#25

Post by socar »

doubled112 wrote: post #7
skilled wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shell sessions and bouncers sort of alleviate the history issue if that is what you really need. I always thought that not having history was part of the magic of IRC. That said, all your private messages as well as any messages in public channels can be logged and will persist on your PC until you delete them.

You can't just tell Julie in HR to get a persistent shell session and set up her bouncer. For Matrix, you can say "go to chat.company.com" and click log in with Google.

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#26

Post by agentultra »

There are technical issues with running an IRC server and the protocol.

It's the UI/UX you mention that seems to be the bigger blocker.

In my experience IRC was the preferred platform among software developers for a long time. Setting up a persistent shell and bouncer and managing your logs was common and preferred. It was how a good deal of the, small at the time, open source world ran (this is the 90's up through the aughts).

I recall that started to change when Slack and other alternatives started breaking into the market. A newer generation of software developers didn't care for IRC and the UI/UX around it. Open source, open protocols, free (as in freedom) software didn't matter to this generation.

And as management and executives got more interested in micro-managing developers we needed to include non-technical folks into our chat systems... which is where the UI/UX argument struck again: our friends in HR, management, etc couldn't be expected to setup their own irssi + screen client, log rotation, notifiers, etc; writing and hosting custom bots to integrate with systems became a chore and lost art, etc.

Now we have to run multi-gigabyte, resource hogging clients to post memes and emojis. But at least it's easier to administer and get folks on board. At the cost of all your data belongs to Slack I guess.

You do get a lot out of Slack than chat though. Forms, integrations, workflows, huddles, etc. It's a different ballgame from early to modern Slack.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#27

Post by TrueDuality »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #14
doubled112 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just tell Julie in HR to get a persistent shell session and set up her bouncer. For Matrix, you can say "go to chat.company.com" and click log in with Google.

You absolutely can tell Julie in HR to log into the company instance of The Lounge or whatever friendly frontend IT set up. Users should no more need to run their own bouncer than their own homeserver.

This assumes that there is actually a friendly frontend meeting the equivalent feature and UI/UX experiences of things like Slack and ignoring the cost of maintaining that service by IT.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#28

Post by smallerfish »

polpo wrote: post #16

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring: Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point). Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screen…

Slack's pretty bad as an information repository. How do you know there hasn't been a subsequent discussion that updated the conclusion of a particular chat? Search isn't particularly consistent in how it serves up results.

By all means chat asynchronously to decide on something, but then get it into a wiki. I actually like Slack's auto-expiry for free accounts, as it incentivizes the mindset - if you want to keep the information around, boil it down into a readable form and put it in the right place in the company's documentation.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#29

Post by WJW »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #13

"I know the UI/UX isn't the best, but that could probably be fixed pretty easily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Most of the time when you ask "why isn't open source thing more popular" the answer is UI/UX. Impericaly, it is neither easy nor common for open source software to have good enough UI/UX to be adopted by non-technical people.

This is the biggest answer. IRC is in that most terrible of spots where there are too many users with too many different clients to ever universally adopt new features anymore, while being old enough that many desirable new features have been implemented by its non-OSS competitors.

It is not too dissimilar to email, or the whole IPv4/IPv6 debacle.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#30

Post by [deleted] »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #22
polpo wrote: post #16

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring: Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point). Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screen…

> Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. I've never had to do that and Discord or Slack aren't the right places for that anyway they should go in some knowledge repository like a wiki.

[deleted]
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