Hacker News Reader

Comment by ry-n | Hacker News Reader

> I know plenty of non-technical people who chatted on IRC who were not developers > I simply don't understand where the idea of needing a technical background came from for using something like IRC.

You don't have to be a developer but you do need a level of technical background higher than that of the average computer user. There are plenty of tech-savvy, non-developers who can get up and running with things like IRC. There are plenty more non-technical users who can't. Or at least wouldn't given the learning curve time commitment.

I'm the only person in my family who would be able to sign on to IRC in under an hour whereas they'd all be able to have slack up and running in a matter of minutes.

View on HN

> You don't have to be a developer but you do need a level of technical background higher than that of the average computer user.

Unless the technical skill of the average computer user has decreased substantially in the last 10 to 15 years, that shouldn't really be the case.

It has. Everyone uses computers now for less technical tasks, and some pretty much only use their phone or tablet.

Time to learn something then.

Sure... they learned Slack.

Nothing to learn there.

That's correct. Because it's the FLOSS devs who need to learn to empathize with the ordinary user.

Disclaimer - A FLOSS dev here.

> Because it's the FLOSS devs who need to learn to empathize with the ordinary user.

If you were talking about using these protocols over a telnet session, then I would be more inclined to agree with that statement, but just installing an application, entering a server name and account credentials (the latter of which aren't needed for IRC), and connecting isn't any more difficult than creating an account on slack and connecting by entering the address in the browser.

Have you ever worked a support role for an application?

Regular users have amazing blind spots. Also you’re not giving slack enough credit for their smooth onboarding process.

> Regular users have amazing blind spots.

Of course, but I don't think that Slack has done a better job with this compared to previous solutions. In a lot of ways, it's worse given its performance issues. For example, I never experienced UI lag in a chat application until I used Slack (comparing it with UIs like a GUI IRC application, AIM, ICQ, MSN messenger, Yahoo messenger, Skype, etc). Second, auto-completion and search do not work like they do in previous chat applications (or other applications in general) due to infinite scroll and the default of doing a global search instead of just limiting it to the chat or group. Third, the fact that you're forced to join some channels because you were invited or can't leave a channel because you're the last one in it are other issues that come to mind.

Slack’s performance issues have nothing to do with the people using it’s abilities.

As much as it annoys me too, it appears that people actually using it have enough tolerance for it that it doesn’t matter.

I don’t think you realise how well you just made the case for using Slack instead of IRC or XMPP with that comment.

No. I expect a certain competence when using a computer. If this level of competence is not enough to even install a piece of software and configure the most basic settings, then this person should not own a PC, yet use one.

It's amazing that when it comes to computers, it is somehow acceptable to be dumb. It's acceptable to not learn new stuff. It's acceptable to not read in order to understand stuff. As can be read in the comments here.

Do you want to be ‘right’, or actually have users?

The whole ethos of startups and Silicon Valley has been around finding a market for your product. If people don’t want to use it then you can’t blame anyone but yourself.

Feel free to chat with yourself using an ideologically pure system... it’ll be lonely though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com