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

Why I Live in IRC (2015)

aaronparecki.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 129 posts

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#51

Post by rubinlinux »

Surprised no one even mentioned the matrix protocol yet. Its still very rough around the edges, but for an old school IRC person talk of Discord as an alternative just hurts me.

Do I want my community to be completely owned by a corporation, so that all the work we put into the network effect belongs to a company and they can impose/change rules at any moment? Have we learned nothing?

Matrix is the modern IRC alternative, not discord. And in some cases, you can run a bridge between the two, so I use a matrix client as my daily IRC interface -- best of both worlds.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#52

Post by Repulsion9513 »

unleaded wrote: post #50
bostik wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who thinks that many of the listed gripes are core features? > TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. Fair enough. This would be a likely problem with any non-private chat system. > It won't preview gifs Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party supplied fourth-party content? No thank you. > No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it…

>Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party supplied fourth-party content? No thank you. I would describe it as a funny picture that moves

But on the other hand, sometimes it's goatse.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#53

Post by jcranmer »

swozey wrote: post #14

I was an ircop on efnet for like half my childhood until they figured out I wasn't 18 and desynced my server. I just could never go back to IRC. I stopped using it probably 15 years ago or more after using it for 20ish years. Got my first job on it, learned linux and networking through it, definitely propelled my career. TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like…

> Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.

Freenode had all the drama and discovered how to kill off 99% of its use in just three easy steps: (see https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 for the dramatic abruptness of its fall)

1. There was some drama over the new "owner" of freenode which resulted in most of the moderation staff leaving, planning to set up a new network (libera chat).

2. Most of the communities saw this drama and basically said "uh, we're still evaluating what the hell we're doing," with many opting in the interim to do something along the lines of have presence in both freenode and libera. Freenode responding by de-op'ing and kickbanning people from channels that mentioned libera in the topic. This resulted in pretty much every community still on the fence going "thank you for making the decision, we're now on libera, goodbye freenode."

3. A few months later, the network cleared its chanserv and nickserv lists and basically completely rebooted itself from scratch, to avoid the problems of legacy people.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#54

Post by BMSR »

What I like about irc is that the x-topic "communities" are one big channel, centralized. Compare that with Discord where you join a server/guild and you are presented with 10 or more channels and you have to take a guess into what the normal/off-topic/on-topic/general channel is. But irc is also very strange, I wouldn't be surprised if I had been chatting with a swarm of bots all these years.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#55

Post by Ancapistani »

ranger_danger wrote: post #32

The reason I don't like to use IRC is 100% the people. Just so brazenly rude and egotistical, and always confidently wrong.

I agree with your statement of fact, but not your conclusion :)

Those kinds of people are pretty much just a different interface into a knowledge base. Once you get past the off-putting nature of their responses, I've found that IRC has a higher proportion of correct answers to complex problems.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#56

Post by mewse-hn »

jcranmer wrote: post #53
swozey wrote: post #14

I was an ircop on efnet for like half my childhood until they figured out I wasn't 18 and desynced my server. I just could never go back to IRC. I stopped using it probably 15 years ago or more after using it for 20ish years. Got my first job on it, learned linux and networking through it, definitely propelled my career. TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like…

> Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any. Freenode had all the drama and discovered how to kill off 99% of its use in just three easy steps: (see https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 for the dramatic abruptness of its fall) 1. There was some drama over the new "owner" of freenode which resulted in most of the moderation staff leaving, planning to set up a new network (libera chat). 2.…

Even before freenode murdered itself there was controversy around Rob "lilo" Levin's stewardship, leading to the creation of OFTC.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#57

Post by Ancapistani »

dangus wrote: post #20

No mention was ever made of why anyone would want their life filled with so many damn notifications. Half of these seem more appropriate for email, and email is already set up to handle them with zero configuration (like GitHub). Twitter, who cares, that’s a time waster. Home surveillance stuff is also a waste of time. It is basically entirely ineffective, every petty criminal knows to wear a mask and clearance rates…

> Home surveillance stuff is also a waste of time. It is basically entirely ineffective, every petty criminal knows to wear a mask and clearance rates are below 15%.

This is very context-dependent.

If I lived in a large city somewhere and was often not at home, sure - but I live in a small town and am almost always home. "Home surveillance stuff" notifies me when something unexpected is happening on my property and lets me respond to it personally. The clearance rate for reported crimes is immaterial when you're able to prevent the harm from occurring in the first place.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#58

Post by swozey »

sophacles wrote: post #36
swozey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an op when I was under 18, stopped using IRC 15+ years ago, and used it in total for probably 15-20 years. I'm 39 and started at .. Idk, probably 8-9. I think I was an op from 12-16 maybe 17. A lot of ops were people who synced (peered) their stable and moderated servers on good connections with efnet. Like, OC1-3 connections. My friends and I were pretty much apprentice network engineers to a family member who…

Childhood me is envious of childhood you. I had heard about the internet, but didn't get any real access til around when you were already ircopping.

I didn't grow up in California but Virginia so it was pretty lonely. Everyone online was from CA in the 90s and my friends didn't start having family computers until probably the 2000s.

And my parents really weren't very helpful with me growing it into a career. I was always "playing on the computer."

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#59

Post by iotku »

rubinlinux wrote: post #51

Surprised no one even mentioned the matrix protocol yet. Its still very rough around the edges, but for an old school IRC person talk of Discord as an alternative just hurts me. Do I want my community to be completely owned by a corporation, so that all the work we put into the network effect belongs to a company and they can impose/change rules at any moment? Have we learned nothing? Matrix is the modern IRC alterna…

>Matrix is the modern IRC alternative, not discord.

But simultaneously Matrix is not a good enough Discord alternative.

Too much friction, too many issues, and still difficult for non-technical users.

The reason Discord won out is you can just send a link to somebody and they're already on-boarded.

Post reply on HN