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Comment by LocutusOfBorges | Hacker News Reader

Discord, overwhelmingly.

Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump. It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only holdouts are people clinging to their CLIs and people objecting for ideological reasons.

I wish it hadn't come to this, but IRC's just stagnated for too long. The barrier to entry's too high, using it on mobile devices is a chore, the feature set's extremely limited, etc. Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground and made some strides towards creating a modern user experience maybe two years ago, Discord wouldn't have had such a vulnerable market open for it to stroll in and snatch up.

Discord provides seamless cloud message logging, mobile notifications, intuitive clients, a huge ecosystem of easy-to-use bots, and integration with games that just works without the user having to set anything up. Even non-gaming-related communities have been switching to it for convenience's sake.

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> The barrier to entry's too high

I don't understand this statement. One finds IRC clients everywhere. One literally has to know just one command at the beginning: /join. And then if you Google "IRC commands" or something like that, you get the rest of them easily (if your client lacks in the help area).

> the feature set's extremely limited

I don't understand this mindset. Why should a program have an extra-large set of features? Is the value of a program measured by the number of features it has?

> Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground and made some strides towards creating a modern user experience maybe two years ago, Discord wouldn't have had such a vulnerable market open for it to stroll in and snatch up

Apples and oranges. Discord did have serious opponents named Teamspeak, Skype, Mumble and other VOIP clients - but certainly not IRC. And if my memory serves, the first thing they did was to make sure to dislodge those programs from the gamers community.

I’ve been a software engineer for several years now and I still have trouble with MiRC and Adium. I tried Irssi and eventually gave up with it. The problem with IRC is that even the “simple” clients never just work. There’s always some little infuriating quirks that you have to dive super deep into configs to figure out if it’s even possible to resolve without some sort of PR to the repository.

Well, quassel for example doesn’t even have configs, everything is done in simple ways via the UI, and everyone, including the devs, uses that. It’s rocksolid, just works, and if you use the core/client split version, you can also connect a webinterface and mobile client to it.

These kinds of comments almost make me not want to live on this Earth any more.

Most comments really just say:

"IRC is like email. An old boring tool that just does its job. I'm not having fun with it, I'm not feeling special when using, so I need a 'modern' alternative."

I don't think what these comments are saying at all. IRC didn't do it's job well, that's why it was replaced.

I"m a big fan of irccloud. It's the simplest client I've found and it's free, aside from subscribing for power-user features.

> One finds IRC clients everywhere.

Yet I find myself using the web interface of Freenode when I need it, instead of installing a client in my Linux machine with a single command, any of the ones I used for a long time.

> Is the value of a program measured by the number of features it has?

I'd say by the number of features reliably shared by everyone else. This is why XMPP never took off and basically Google killed it.

> Apples and oranges.

Discord specifically targeted communities that used IRC, at least initially. The main difference with the other chat services is that you can enter a room from a browser, so it's almost friction-less to bring someone. IRC natively doesn't support that but many servers could and did (and I think it's the reason IRC remained somewhat popular).

For the record, I don't like Discord for its proprietary and centralized nature (despite calling the communities "servers"). Instead I'll be supporting Matrix and Riot as soon as Riot issue #4488 is fixed.

Having setup and attempted to administer an IRC server, I'd say that's where the barrier exists for someone wanting to create a new community outside of the huge Freenode network.

Why would you want to go outside freenode? They're run by a charity promoting free communication and have encryption for registered users.

So I want to create a new set of channels on freenode. From the home page (on mobile) I’m presented with the following page

https://freenode.net/groupreg

Which is a) very wordy. B) appears to essentially say “only certain kinds of groups are welcome”. C) doesn’t have a simple way of doing so instead being “reach out and discuss with us and then maybe we’ll let you set up shop here”

> One literally has to know just one command at the beginning: /join. And then if you Google "IRC commands"

If your UX requires needing to google for syntax to type into your program in order to use basic features of the app, there is absolutely no way you are going to take off with people that are used to programs like twitter, gchat, skype, and facebook messenger.

I grew up on IRC and have a lot of fond memories of it. I don't particularly miss all the constant rolling brown-out connection issues and functionality/syntax that differed depending on what server you were connected to. It's no wonder someone came in and easily stole the thunder out from underneath IRC. Engineer types might have been keen to how transparently most IRC clients exposed the protocol, but I suspect for the vast majority of users IRC was tolerated, not embraced.

I don't think Discord deserves all the credit either, I really think it started with slack being adopted within developer communities and open source projects. Discord got the gamers, Slack (initially at least) got the developers.

> /join

and /password or was that /msg notify something or ??? If you get it wrong, congrats, you've just published your password to the world.

IRC wasn't even very good compared to other cli oriented programs such as the Unix shell or muds/moos.

> Discord, overwhelmingly.

A community I'm a moderator of recently set up shop in Discordland, due to its superior user management stuff. Both I and another person independently the similarities to IRC; I said that we're re-inventing IRC practices from the ground up.

But with rich previews, seamless device handoff, persistent messaging when offline, including notifications, and of course VOIP/Video on top.

Now, you can get some of that in IRC via a bouncer, but it's nice to just have it baked in.

Of course, it is a centralized system, with all the issues present there.

I just wish this wasn't a battle of decentralization vs centralization. Discord seems cool and all but channel operators lack reasonable amount of ownership over their channels and Discord touches every message that comes through its network.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but do you mean ownership over Discord channels or Discord servers?

I mean servers. The protocol is locked to the platform.

Unfortunately it seems to be an irreversible trend: Decentralized/federated services with many compatible client options are dying and being replaced by many competing and incompatible centralized services, each with few (or one) client options. It's like programmers are all constantly asking the question: "How can we make the Internet worse?"

If E-mail were invented today, there would be 5+ competing protocols, owned by 5+ competing companies, you could only use clients written by those companies, and you wouldn't be able to send E-mail to someone on a different service than the one you were on. Kind of like the current text chat app cluster-fuck we have to live with.

I think Discord only hits the gaming community. What I liked about IRC was the diversity. I loved talking #basketball on Efnet, and so on.

discord has also had $80 million dollars in funding

an IRC network developed entirely by volunteers can't really compete with that sort of funding

What did Discord spend that money on?

I'd wager that most of the value gained was in marketing.

Odd argument. I run an irc network. Quite a large one. My funding is less than 0.00001% of that. It doesn't take much to out compete monetarily. Even if a large amount of your total money goes to marketing.

Does Discord provide easy collection of communications to the NSA?

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