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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

In modern chat apps like FB Messenger or WeChat, you can hail a taxi, send money, send your current location, send a variety of stickers/gifs, send disappearing messages, send pixellated messages you have to pay to unpixelate (only in WeChat as far as I know), among other things.

Regardless of what you think of these features, modern chat apps are certainly very different from IRC.

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Are all those actions considered "chat" features?

I am probably old fashioned, but I prefer separation of services. If a taxi driver was on IRC, sure, I could "hail" him. I could post my current GPS location to anyone I please. Gifs & vid (links) are just as easily shared.

Yeah, I understand integration, but... I curmudgeonly fight it. I hope I am being Unix-like by striving for separation of services, but I am probably just being stubborn. :(

>I hope I am being Unix-like ... but I am probably just being stubborn. :(

I am going to use this in future.

I tried to ward off this exact sort of comment with the line "regardless of what you think of these features". I don't feel like getting into a debate about whether the millions of non-tech teenagers using chat apps should care about The UNIX Philosophy (TM). I just wanted to point out that, rightly or wrongly, they're very different now, contrary to popular HN belief.

I remember writing a generic chat bot that took in commands and did arbitrary things with it circa 1998, and I was already following decades-old prior art.

I bet if we could magic up a list of all the things you could do from IRC in, say, 2000, by using the right chat bot, you'd be less impressed by hailing a taxi.

The rest of what you mention is just service-specific frippery. All the services have had frippery here and there. None of them are particularly important to text moving around, in the end.

I think the point that people are trying (but often failing) to make is that, in this "era" of chat, rather than there being global user-agnostic bots (e.g. Cleverbot) or bots you have to set up and run on some server yourself (e.g. a personal channel dice roller), bots are now also available as a thing you can consume through the service—in the same way that "addons" (third-party services) can be consumed through Heroku, or "service subscriptions" like Netflix can be consumed through a TV box. It's the discoverability and consumption-model of the functionality that's novel, rather than the functionality itself.

The novel model also sits at the intersection of "interesting enough to third-parties to incentivize them to create lots of these integrations", and "usable by non-technical people", allowing anyone to "have a bot" for anything they need without all the logistical implications that idea had previously.

you never heard of irc bots?

Yes of course I have. How easy it is to do something and how integrated it is with the app matters. Otherwise all chat apps are the same as a combination of telephone and postal mail.

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