Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

I spend time in a coding Discord channel, it's a regular many times a day thing for people to paste 1-10 lines of code. With syntax highlighting. That's not possible on IRC, pasting 10 lines is "spam" and gets you complained at, everyone needs their own syntax highlighter, or the sender needs to bodge uploading to a pastebin site and other people need scripts to fetch them or clicking links waiting for a separate program to open to see them, then they're not inline, the sender can't edit them afterwards.

Emoji.

Search.

Pictures.

Screensharing.

Voice calling.

Video calling.

Web clients which can join video/audio calls.

Smartphone apps.

Push-Notifications.

Colours.

Embedded inline Office365 documents, in the case of Teams.

Meeting invites built-in to Outlook, in the case of Teams.

Click thing in Teams, opens in Edge browser with the Edge sidebar open to the Teams chat place where you clicked, for context.

Email notifications of things said in Teams chats.

Integration with company directory for looking up who people are.

IRC is for people whose reaction to those is to complain or sneer about how they don't want them.

> No support for server-side history

That's a feature, not a bug. If you want conversations to be searchable, use email. Instant messaging is like phone calls or in person communication: transient (if potentially async).

> No support for attachments.

Good, no silly gifs cluttering up the chat. But this is a feature that's easily added.

> Poor user authentication

This one probably has the most merit. But probably easy to implement with a few server tweaks.

> Short - and unpredictable - message length limits

Brevity is a feature. It's a chat, no one wants to listen to a monologue in conversation. The unpredictability is a bit annoying.

> Crude permissions system

How fine grained do you need it to be? Read and write access for channels exist. There are plenty of bots which can grant additional permissions based on whatever criteria you set out.

But hey, I'm also that stubborn bastard who still likes text-only email.

The is only 1 reason for me: slack connect.

Whenever I sign up a new customer, they get a slack channel where they can talk with our team. By far the best way to do this is to connect our slacks. With anything else they'd have to log in to another system or download a new client which means it won't happen.

I would love to try any of the other open source improved chat solutions out there. But the network effect, alone, keeps me on a paid plan.

That might not be the official reason, in Europe you can argue you sometimes discuss customer info and thus it needs to be deleted once no longer relevant.

Of course stating you're doing it for the purpose of destroying evidence is stupid.

> [server-side history] That's a feature, not a bug.

Whatever your personal feelings on message history are, people and businesses need functionality like usable mobile clients they can receive messages in without keeping the client open continuously, or the ability for administrators to delete messages which have been sent by other users. IRC doesn't, and cannot, provide those features.

> [no attachments] Good, no silly gifs cluttering up the chat.

Also means it's difficult to discuss inherently audiovisual content like graphical designs, or to transfer files -- all things that come up in business contexts.

> [permissions] How fine grained do you need it to be?

It's not that the permissions aren't fine-grained so much as that the entire system is crudely designed. Users' permissions in a channel are mostly tied to their presence in the channel; if you leave and rejoin (or disconnect and reconnect to IRC), any permissions are lost and have to be regranted by another user in the channel. Bans are tied to nicknames (which are volatile) or connection hostnames (which are differently volatile). Invite-only channels use passwords. And so on. It's a mess.

Yes, you can add bots to handle some of that for you -- but having to rely on bolt-on components for basic functionality is a sign of a badly designed service.