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Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

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101–109 of 109 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#101
Hugely. Years back we used it at work before switching to Slack. Wish we could switch back I am sick of stupid GIFs, pointless reactions and the rest of Slacks bullshit (terrible client, buggy "editor", etc).

One good thing? I've discovered Ripcord [1], which is an alternative slack client that has great IRC like vibes :)

[1] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#102
post #71

I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops and you miss messages. You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something t…

Took me all of 10 minutes to set up irssi on a free google cloud vps many years ago. It's still chugging along. ~ uptime 23:22:27 up 787 days, 15:10, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 It's not that hard.

So you don't ever install kernel patches? That's nothing to brag about.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#103
post #77
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took me all of 10 minutes to set up irssi on a free google cloud vps many years ago. It's still chugging along. ~ uptime 23:22:27 up 787 days, 15:10, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 It's not that hard.

Not that hard, if you don't care about two things: - Typing latency - Access from mobile devices Many people don't care about those things; good for them. Unfortunately for me, I do. I can (and do) use a bouncer, which theoretically solves both problems: text entry is handled by my local IRC client rather than every keystroke going through a server, and I can run an IRC client on my phone. Unfortunately, bouncers are…

Check out Termux on Android. As mentioned you can use Mosh and you can use it with Termux.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#104

I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops and you miss messages. You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something t…

>You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). ...Yeah. From installing znc from your favourite package manager to having it set up and running in your client is all of ten minutes, with SSL, auto-joins, channel history and all. Is it a barrier? Yeah. Is it so much of a barrier that it would push someone concerned about centralized services and proprietary software to j…

I don't know what any of this "znc", "package manager", "SSL", "auto-join" mumbo jumbo is.

I'm just going to use Slack and move on with my life.

Actually I lied, I do know what all that mumbo jumbo is, but I hope you get my point.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#105
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took me all of 10 minutes to set up irssi on a free google cloud vps many years ago. It's still chugging along. ~ uptime 23:22:27 up 787 days, 15:10, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 It's not that hard.

So you don't ever install kernel patches? That's nothing to brag about.

I wouldn't call it bragging. I just have a lot of trust that my current kernel is robust enough for this particular application. If there were a serious exploit I obviously would update.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#107
I miss some channels, but not necessarily IRC as a whole.

I still believe that #csharp on freenode is the main reason why I pursued .NET as a career choice. As far as channels go, they were by far the most helpful when starting out, and they never made me feel like an idiot for not knowing something. Most importantly, the channel was alive. There are so many channels out there with hundreds of users online and zero conversation.

The other day I tried to join a Rails IRC channel to ask about Action Mailbox, and when I saw the quiet channel I decided to ask a question and lurk. In 24 hours, the only messages sent were from people looking for help, and then leaving.

What I miss above anything else is helpful people. It's what drew me to IRC, it's what initially drew me to Stack Overflow, and I'd wager that it's what drew many people to HN. IMO, the medium itself isn't anywhere near as important as the people.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#108
post #11

IRC in 1991, until maybe 1999... I don't think anything like that will ever come back. There were some vandals with their scripts, but mostly it was way more civilized than you ever see these days. Had a lot of enjoyable conversations, lots of fun. Haven't used IRC for almost 20 years now.

An elegant protocol for a more civilized age.

(I'm sorry, just had to do that.)

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