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Comment by throwaway9475 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's necessarily a generational thing. I know people in their 30s who don't know what IRC is (or who at least haven't used it), and I know people in their 20s who DO use it (or at least know what it is). And it's not as though the knowledge is lost; IRC still exists and there exists plenty of information about it. It's just not carried around in people's heads as much. None of this is good or bad; it just is.

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I don't think it's a generational thing either. I know how to use IRC and how to connect with it. The problem is the difference in the amount of energy demanded by the set-up process. Connecting to Slack is extremely simple and I don't have to fiddle with the settings in order to get a decent experience.

Compared to IRC, I have to:

  - Figure out how to configure my client.
  - Figure out how to interact with the user account and moderation bots on Freenode or $other_server.
  - Figure out how to set up something like ZNC in order to federate the client on my phone with the client on my laptop so I don't miss messages.
  - ...

It's an epic yak shave that sucks massive amounts of time and energy a from the thing I joined the community to do: improve a piece of software that isn't IRC.

The benefit, though, is once you are set up with IRC, joining new channels is a breeze, especially since most open source software uses a single network (Freenode). All I have to do is type something like

  /join #rust-lang

and I'm in the new channel. Compare this with Slack, where, no matter how many teams you've joined in the past, you have to go through the exact same rigamarole to join a new Slack team.

Discord avoids that issue by having a global identifier, similar to your connection to an IRC network.

However, having that global identifier / IRC network connection is a tradeoff - it forces you to use a single consistent identity for every single interaction on that network. For some people this is a plus; for others it is a negative. Slack's teams option allows people to use different identities for different instances.

> I know how to use IRC and how to connect with it.

> [...]

> - Figure out how to configure my client.

> - Figure out how to interact with the user account and moderation bots

I disagree with your initial claim. :P

Those are irc basics, things you only have to learn once, and there is documentation online and on the web. It's worth it to spend the time to learn a tool that you can use throughout your profession, even as the proprietary flavor-of-the-month services come and go.

That still ignores the existence of a huge usability problem. The investment of time may pay off in the long run, but IRC is large enough investment (and ongoing maintenance, ZNC doesn't just take care of its self forever) that people will take a route of less resistance when presented.

This all reminds of a few years ago when folks were banging on about how we needed to use Gitorious instead of GitHub for Open Source hosting. Gitorious is dead now and it wasn't until GitLab came along and recognized the usability problem that we got a viable Open Source alternative.

Same thing has happened in gaming with the introduction of Discord. No one wants to bother with mumble, team speak, or vent.

Trying to get everyone in our group setup with mumble was a pain for the people who only use their computer to game. When we switched to Discord it took maybe 10 minutes to get our group of ten all in one chat.

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