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Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

drewdevault.com

451–460 of 499 posts

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The discussion is about users who use IRC directly and consciously. From the parent post I replied to, "IRC's user base is declining". Every single person watching a Twitch stream is an IRC user, whether they know it or not. How do you determine the popularity of something? How many people use it. Android is extremely popular. Do most of the folks realize they're using an Android phone? Nope. Does it mean Android i…

Android is built on top of Linux, is it reasonable to say that the popularity of Android phones mean that Linux is popular?

Of course! And by digging deeper, we can also establish that cellphones are popular, and that electronics are also popular. It's going the other way (away from generality) which lessens popularity, since you're targeting something _more_ specific.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, your definition of popularity is different than mine, but either way my post still refutes his point about the declining userbase. > No, what I meant was, people no longer think of IRC as the tool to use to talk about projects and communities. They used to. That was its primary use case. That use case is shrinking, so IRC is becoming less popular. There's plenty of other avenues to use these days, so the numbe…

> Obviously this is going to be anecdotal, but with the ~20 people I know who aren't technologically savvy, they'd only be able to tell you if they're using an Apple phone or not. My mother, for instance, has no clue that she's using a Windows phone. I think this has quite a bit to do with what class of phone they buy. Android is marketed very heavily in certain contexts when buying a phone, just as iPhone is. Walk i…

Agreed, although I believe the end goal of my comment was that after leaving the store, the term "Android" is completely forgotten, whereas "Apple" is almost a household term because you see them everywhere in pop culture—movies, the news, in schools, etc.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#453
post #437
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they're all IRC users inadvertently. That doesn't add to IRC's popularity. If Twitch disabled IRC and switched its chatrooms to some ghetto socket.io app, most of its users wouldn't know. > Of course they wouldn't, you're already speaking with them. Slack is fine for trusted networks of peers (businesses), but not much else. I won't start chatting with any my friends using it, nor would I bother to sign up…

>> Of course they're all IRC users inadvertently. That doesn't add to IRC's popularity. If Twitch disabled IRC and switched its chatrooms to some ghetto socket.io app, most of its users wouldn't know. Saying if Twitch disabled IRC is like saying if Slack changed to an IRC core... , which is not meaningful when discussing how many users Slack and IRC have. Twitch has several millions of users of influence. If they did…

If a proprietary IRC network that is managed as basically an API layer for a service that isn't primarily about chat is the primary tentpole for a platform...

That doesn't seem like a really fantastic outcome for IRC. I guess if you're looking to come up with a conclusion that IRC has more users it is a useful tool. If you're looking to see what the future of distributed and local FOSS and corporate software team communication is? Less so.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, we'd have the world's most complex ncurses UI, and a security ACL system whose complexity would rival X509. And normal people would still use Slack, because Slack was able to make simple design decisions that benefit the overwhelming majority of users but piss off Unix nerds like us.

Giving "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars isn't a good idea. Giving it to a company making a single IRC client , on the other hand, would probably result in something like Slack, only much better.

I'm not sure how you conclude it would be better. I suspect you'd end up with something approaching Slack, only without interoperability with the rest of the IRC ecosystem.

The stuff IrcCloud, Slack and HipChat undo? That's the stuff that seems to be alluring to the steadfast IRC users. Inscrutable commands, nick and chanserv and unencrypted passwords sent via a command that could very easily be typo'd to broadcast in a channel, obscure partitioning behavior that is very much not what most businesses want, a lack of accountability or verifiability, a lack of robust logging and search...

I say these in a negative way, because that's my perspective. For many people they'd list many of these in positive ways like, "improved anonymity", "off the record by default", "network robustness", etc.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're going to find evidence for the argument that IRC is more popular than Slack. IRC's user base is declining, Slack's is growing, and the numbers we have now suggest that Slack is already much more popular.

Slack has 1.1 million users _total_ ( http://www.fastcompany.com/3047819/with-over-1-million-users... ), meanwhile Twitch uses IRC, and has ~3.3 million per day alone ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/29/twitchs-viewers-reach... ), using stats taken eleven months ago while more than doubling its monthly viewer numbers every year. Freenode isn't the only network out there =)

[deleted]

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downmods. No quotes. No specifics. As usual.

I can do this until I'm rate limited.

I am terribly sorry I missed your request. I've been busy tending to my daughter and hastily dashing out some code I need for a teaching opportunity next week. I can see it caused you enough distress to post twice.

Let me be straightforward with you, since you seem to be the sort that will not appreciate the standard cultural niceties.

So perhaps maybe you just did a poor job to express your specific point as you tripped over yourself to demonstrate to everyone you have read a bit of philosophy and logic. But it certainly would be reasonable that you entered a conversation without invitation responding to

> That the reasoning is fallacious doesn't make the conclusion incorrect.

With:

> However, if you study the truth table a bit longer, you will realize that you should stop reading any text which contains fallacious or self-contradictory logic.

Implying that if you could construe any single statement in my post as lacking in robustness from a logical perspective, then you should simply ignore the entire thing. This is regardless of the author's intent that this actually be a real point, or perhaps just a literary device or joke. One might actually read the whole post first, notice there is some technical substance, and come to a different conclusion before posting.

This impression is further reinforced by your frustration over rate limiting as you implied that my response, specifically saying that I didn't actually present my tautology as anything but a cute literary device to open what I considered to be a rather dry if somewhat acidic post.

You said,

> I've been rate-limited, so any fallacious (or non) arguments posted in response will need to wait a while for a proper response (some have already been typed up).

Which from my perspective certainly looks like you were ready to fire off a post explaining to me with as many latin words as possible aimed at trying to prove exactly that.

Perhaps, in the future, you may want to consider efficacy first and strict correctness secondly when discussing things in a casual forum with the (entirely barbaric, I agree) feature of "downvoting." Or perhaps just not entering conversations you don't have anything substantial to add to.

You might feel some irritation at this, because it can seem like an anti-intellectual stance. Sadly, you're existing in a community that has to deal with many people perpetually misusing terms like "ad hominem" and "genetic fallacy" and "truth table" in the worst way, to the point where it's a cognitive shortcut to simply pass it by or perhaps even express this cultural signal via downvotes.

I don't like it very much either, but cultural norms are not something we rationally argue with but instead can only hope to influence gradually.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#458
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But decentralized is the best thing ever! I hate that argument. If decentralized was so great, then it'd be more popular, but it's not. More and more centralized stuff is exploding in popularity.

Centralization is being driven by a lot of things, not least of which is that decentralization is really really hard. But a lot of it comes from mobile -- the idea behind decentralized apps before mobile came along was that bandwidth was not very dear -- oh, sure, it was limited in the days when IRC first became popular, but there was no reason to leave any of it unused. Local compute power was the same -- you may no…

It's also worth noting that it's not clear what decentralization brings to the table from the perspective any single organization. Most organizations will want a central authority for the history of their group communications.

Such facilities are bolted onto IRC, but never truly integrate with it the way other solutions have offered.

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#459
post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But back before the WWW saw non-trivial deployment, IRC was the #1 use of bandwidth on the internet! Something from the 90's must still be true today!

I was surprised when I read this comment. Do you have any evidence for this? If I had to pick some protocols off the top of my head I would have thought nntp, smtp, ftp, but certainly not irc.

I assume that he'd be talking about the IRC DCC sub-protocol.

CTCP and then SEND bots?

Re: Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's just _obvious_ why Uh, nope. Most people use communication platforms due to network effects: because they were invited to use it, because their friends/coleagues use it. Slack is no different.

Considering Slack is a per-organization service with minimal cross talk between organizations, your premise seems flawed. I mean, Slack appeared on scene after many other technologies existed. People recommend it for their friends because it works well. There is no global network effect at play.

I don't think his point needs Slack to have a global network effect built in. I'd assume that, usually, a small handful of people in an organization decide on using Slack. Once the choice is made, network effects lock members in. Assuming the average org has 20 people or so, probably 90% of Slack's users are probably thanks to network effects.
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