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Comment by shitloadofbooks | Hacker News Reader

Do you connect with a 1200 baud acoustic coupler modem or are you average person who uses a fibre connection and off-the-shelf router?

Do you take a horse and cart to work or are you an average person who drives a car or catches the train?

Do you mill your own bread, or are you an average person who eats machine milled and produced bread?

Do you pump and sanitize your own water, or are you an average person who turns on the tap?

Calling people "average" for not using outdated and poorly designed applications that were written by 1 or 2 people in their spare time, versus applications and services designed by tens-to-hundreds of people, with the input of designers, UI and UX engineers, etc is moronic.

IRC, FTP, SMTP, Token Ring, etc are as good as they could have been at the time, but they are awful by modern standards. We should learn from them and design better successors.

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Your implied comparisons are ridiculous. You're using this website via HTTP, which isn't much different in age from IRC. Age and the number of people who worked on them have nothing to do with their usefulness; some ideas last, some don't.

Usability is a big and important consideration in creating beginners.

Slack has been excellent at introducing irc inspired, and irc borrowed concepts of bots, channels, aliases to the masses.

Oddly slack had a pretty painful sign up in the beginning to keep people on different subdomains.

I'm not sure if today's modern standards are going to look much better looking back in 5 years.

Maybe the measure of old techs is how much they still dominate from what is transferable and endures, like the concept of IRC->Slack, email->messaging, and forums to social media.

There is a fair question to ask how many new things are novel, vs rebooted or reincarnated. Bittorrent maybe, blockchain for sure.

Slack is not a successor to IRC because it's not a protocol. It's just another monolithic chat application.

Mass produced cars, bread, and public water are all over 100 years old. It’s funny you only use ancient tech as counter examples for avoiding ancient tech.

Do you still use a landline or are you the "average" person that just has a mobile phone? This may differ by a few demographics, but I think there are more modern examples.

I’ve adopted the nineteen seventies tech, absolutely. Why be stuck in the 1800’s?

> Do you take a horse and cart to work or are you an average person who drives a car or catches the train?

Neither thanks. I ride a bicycle with an internal gear hub (IGHs, which are a technology that are over a century old,and put modern derailers to shame). I sometimes also walk.

Newer and more horsepower is not always better.

IRC being awful doesn't automatically make current alternatives not awful. I use IRC within my expectations, just as I do with other services.

Just because I expect a certain demographic in IRC doesn't mean I exclude myself from interacting with other ones too.

Without engaging the parent comment directly, the IRC user demographic is no longer average but that's okay. Average is also okay - there's room in this world for both.

Facebook and Twitter though, are trash as far as time sinks go.

Irc with proper roaming support and push notifications would blow discord or slack out of the water.

Newer is not necessarily better.

The lack of familiarity with irc from slack only users seems to reveal an unfamiliarity with irc being a connected universe of many slack sites being on one network.

The Lounge is a web client, so you can access it from any browser (PWA, push notification support). Since your IRC connection runs on a server, roaming and connection drops is not a problem.

https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

Aka a bouncer?

Yes, but baked in. Bouncers are horrible UX and a huge obstacle to onboarding.

"this service is only usable on your phone if you also sign up for another service" pretty much makes it a non-starter.

And logging and services that aren’t hacky god clients and user accounts as first class and...

IRC has had literal decades to be improved and only now do people get serious about it after Slack and friends sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

Older isn’t necessarily better either. IRC has stagnated hard, about the only thing it has on the competitors is that it’s free.

> ... it’s free.

And doesn't require 8 GB of RAM to run a client.

Ha ha that's crazy talk! Eventually they threw my IRC server off of EFNet because 8 total megabytes of ram for the server+OS was too little for the working set.

>about the only thing it has on the competitors is that it’s free.

It's more than 'free'. It's an open standard. You can write a slack client in your favorite language and it will continue to work for years.

Slack does not compete with that.

^"[IRC] client and it will work for years" ?

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