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

IRC turns thirty

oulu.fi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 232 posts

Re: IRC turns thirty

#161

Post by jillesvangurp »

subhro wrote: post #3

I am invariably going to see in the world of Slack, "IRC, why don't you die already". No, IRC is not going to die. FreeNode is alive and well. And while you busy slamming and wishing death of IRC, just check the memory usage of your Slack client.

Irc is all but dead. I see less and less places where it is used. In the same way NNTP is dead as a doornail and completely irrelevant. Last time I saw that used for something else than filesharing was something like 10 years ago. The same place also used IRC.

Both failed to modernize or keep up with progress. The only places where this stuff is at all still used/tolerated is places where the average age is well above forty and where the audience is engineers only. Most millennials that I work with don't even know what this stuff is because they simply never encountered anything where this is still in use. The ones that do tend to be male and heavily involved with OSS. It's a somewhat elitist thing at this point.

People seem to like to hate slack and similar solutions. The OSS way to deal with stuff like this is to build something better and not get too nostalgic about decades old stuff that did not keep up with a changing world.

Here are the design goals for a modern team chat solution: - It must be stupidly easy to create a private team. Think minutes. This is not something you put an engineer on either. That would be a waste of time/resources. - There must be zero admin overhead. This is the first thing you do in a new project. SAAS is the way to go here for most places; sign up, click, click done. There's absolutely no excuse to waste any time setting up software, servers, and committing to managing that for the vast majority of teams. - It has to be inclusive. Anywone should be able to jump in. Especially non technical people. Like your manager, designers, users, etc. - It has to have mobile apps that are usable and fully featured.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#162

Post by agumonkey »

pen2l wrote: post #143
tapland wrote: post #99

Met my fiancée over IRC many years ago and we're both using it as our main social communication with others online. It's an enclave untouched by much of the current toxicity of social media. It requires you to make friends with others based on your words and not content filtering algorithms. You are exposed to other people with other ideas since it isn't filtered. All with a reasonably high lowest level since the lac…

> current toxicity of social media The only response I can conjure up for this is “wat” IRC in my experience is the most toxic and mean-spirited place on earth. 4chan is easier to take because I can justify their meanness to lulz. People on IRC seem to be out to kill people’s spirit. There are some exceptions like python on free node which is heavily moderated, but by and large (in my nearly 15 years of heavy IRCing)…

It's true that IRC is not free of tension and caustic groups. That said, like reddit, you can find very nice places to chat. #electronics #emacs both are very light on issues and very openminded (maybe too open minded some would say).

Re: IRC turns thirty

#163

Post by agumonkey »

n0mad01 wrote: post #152
pen2l wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> current toxicity of social media The only response I can conjure up for this is “wat” IRC in my experience is the most toxic and mean-spirited place on earth. 4chan is easier to take because I can justify their meanness to lulz. People on IRC seem to be out to kill people’s spirit. There are some exceptions like python on free node which is heavily moderated, but by and large (in my nearly 15 years of heavy IRCing)…

wow, i have not made such experiences on IRC, worst things happened to me were questions go unnoticed. but i also use it only for very specific technical topics.

I saw some, people can be tense, angry, mean, sometimes even so while wrong. I remember a dude going down on me because he misread quicksort in my question and started to unleash unjustified ad-hominem insulting comments until he/she realized.

People are people I guess.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#165

Post by Jaruzel »

VectorLock wrote: post #6

Somebody unearthed an IRC server in the hinterlands of the intranet of the huge tech company I work for. There was nobody there. The company is big on Jabber though...

When I worked for an international bank during the late 90s and early 2000s they had a global IRC network on their internal WAN.

It was heavily used by all staff, which was fairly unique compared to the other banks at the time.

Over time the bank developed their own dedicated client for it, and added extensions to the servers for audit logging and username/realname enforcement, and then eventually spun the department developing the tech off into it's own startup company that then sold the product to other banks and companies. That spin off company is still around selling online collaboration software.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#166

Post by jordigh »

agumonkey wrote: post #162
pen2l wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> current toxicity of social media The only response I can conjure up for this is “wat” IRC in my experience is the most toxic and mean-spirited place on earth. 4chan is easier to take because I can justify their meanness to lulz. People on IRC seem to be out to kill people’s spirit. There are some exceptions like python on free node which is heavily moderated, but by and large (in my nearly 15 years of heavy IRCing)…

It's true that IRC is not free of tension and caustic groups. That said, like reddit, you can find very nice places to chat. #electronics #emacs both are very light on issues and very openminded (maybe too open minded some would say).

I talk a lot in #emacs and I do treat it like a coffee klatch, but when people come with questions, I try to interrupt myself and at least address their questions.

I like #emacs. It's like a gathering of friends who happen to use Emacs.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#167

Post by yoz-y »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #161
subhro wrote: post #3

I am invariably going to see in the world of Slack, "IRC, why don't you die already". No, IRC is not going to die. FreeNode is alive and well. And while you busy slamming and wishing death of IRC, just check the memory usage of your Slack client.

Irc is all but dead. I see less and less places where it is used. In the same way NNTP is dead as a doornail and completely irrelevant. Last time I saw that used for something else than filesharing was something like 10 years ago. The same place also used IRC. Both failed to modernize or keep up with progress. The only places where this stuff is at all still used/tolerated is places where the average age is well abov…

IRC may be elitist but that can be an advantage. For me it is the place where I feel most confortable to have a social chat with strangers.

(Note: there is IRCv3 and irc cloud both of which bring quite a lot of Slack features into IRC)

Re: IRC turns thirty

#168

Post by mxuribe »

I remember back in 1992 (my freshmen year of college), my first exposure to this thing called the internet was via email AND irc. Ah, good ol' irc; what wonderful memories! Happy birthday irc!

Re: IRC turns thirty

#169

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

donatj wrote: post #34

If you've never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet. You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It's all human readable and understandable. It's incredible. It's what an open protocol should be. Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!

Many of the oldest internet protocols are ASCII text protocols. IRC, HTTP, FTP, and SMTP can all be handled by a human being with a telnet client.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#170

Post by lmm »

CookieMon wrote: post #74
subhro wrote: post #3

I am invariably going to see in the world of Slack, "IRC, why don't you die already". No, IRC is not going to die. FreeNode is alive and well. And while you busy slamming and wishing death of IRC, just check the memory usage of your Slack client.

Is there a reason IRC couldn't look like slack to the user? kiwiirc is an opensource webUI IRC client (demo at https://kiwiirc.com/ ). To my untrained eye it looks slack-ish, but not being a slack-native I'm not really sure what Slack's draw is and whether its something webUI clients for IRC can't do.

IRC can't ever have authentication, because most clients won't support it. You can't have conversations that rely on rich text, code blocks with syntax highlighting, embedded images, or web previews: these things are possible (in some cases there's more than one way of doing them) but some users will always be using clients that don't support them, and will regard you as the problem if you try to create an expectation that clients should support those things. In turn this makes useful integrations hard: you can have a bot that sends an alert message that heap usage is high on your server, but it's not going to be able to include a graph. IRC can't ever have server-side history and synchronise read status between devices; you can run another server that does that for you (whether that be IRCCloud, ZNC or something else), but at that point you're not actually using IRC, you're using that server's protocol.
Post reply on HN