Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

> while IRC was always available but rarely used.

Freenode has about 85,000 people logged in right now and there's over 50,000 channels.

I'm in a bunch of tech related channels and there's hundreds (or 1,000+) people in most of them. It's still active and has been for 15+ years. Freenode is just 1 IRC network of many too but it's where a lot of tech channels are set up.

IRC is awesome. You can use it from a terminal (or get a GUI client that uses < 20MB of RAM), it opens instantly, you can connect to a bunch of channels and networks automatically (with password protection on your nick), typing feels instant and you get infinite log history. Doesn't get much better in my opinion.

View on HN

You don't get the log history of what happened while you were offline, though. This is probably the killer feature of Slack over IRC, especially for professional use, together with more seamless attachment integration.

Don't get me wrong, I love IRC. I have been using it for over 20 years (wow, I'm old). I have met there very important people in my life. But I coordinate a team at work, we use Slack and I wouldn't even consider using IRC instead.

You can track logs if you want. It's up to the channel owner. Once you have that set up you won't miss anything, and people new to the channel could view previous history. You could also connect remotely through a server that never reboots too and log things yourself (as a client).

I find Slack to be even worse in that regard because they'll purge your history after 10,000 lines unless you pay, but the payment scheme doesn't make sense for a lot of communities. Like, whose going to pay $15/month per USER if you have 300 people in your channel? That would be $4,500 / month to get unlimited history right? I never signed up because I don't want to pay a mortgage to get chat history.

I dunno. I just don't see the appeal of Slack for both communities and small teams.

First off, the history is NOT purged. It's just not searchable beyond 10,000 messages. Pay for a month (if you can afford it!) and you'll see the entire history available. Further, the cost is $6.67/month -- substantially less that $15.

I'm not fan of Slack for large communities but, seriously, let's stick to facts when discussing the pros and cons.

Interesting. When I goto Slack's pricing page it shows me $15 / month per user (monthly, not annual). But if I goto the same page when logged out then it shows me $6.67 / month.

I'm a part of Slack for some large communities (not by choice but because it's where the organization wants to be), and every few months all of my private message history disappears and it tells me something about upgrading. It's not searchable, but it's also not in the back log either. It's 100% removed from the UI.

To me, that's not a good user experience, where you wake up one day and all of your important chat history is unavailable. It's even worse that it's still available but behind a paywall. So they hold your data hostage unless you pay that 1 month of fees. It's not about not being able to afford it. If you have a large community with 8,000 people, are you really going to spend $53,000+ to get your private messages which you only have access to for 1 month? Not even big companies with 100 million of funding have the paid plan. It might as well be purged even though technically it's not.

IRC is rarely used compared to Slack, with its 10 million users.

I used it daily for decades, but let's not forget netsplits, nick collisions, zero log history (without a bouncer, and then you need a place to run a bouncer!), no file-sharing in a NAT world (dcc stopped working a loooong time ago), and no integration with any other apps, and on and on.

Don't get me wrong, I wish there was an open-source project that built a big group chat system that worked as well as slack and discord do, but it's a joke to say that irc is better than slack.

Netsplits happen once in a blue moon nowadays (on freenode at least), nick collisions are also solved (you can register your nick on freenode and other networks), and you can totally set up logging on your channel and unlike Slack it won't disappear after 10,000 messages. You can also make it accessible through the web so people can easily see past history.

File transfers are definitely an issue over IRC but https://send.firefox.com/ solves that problem very well. For sharing code, there's gists (which I often send directly through my code editor which makes it seamless).

So, what client just allows you to join a channel and scroll up without having to learn the idiosyncrasies of a bot? Now, how do you search every channel on the instance?

I'm curious if someone has figured this out in the interm.

(My current hope lies in Mattermost, honestly.)

My chat logs are just plain text under ~/.weechat/logs and I search them using rip-grep. Works really fast. I am guessing a nicer interface like IRCCloud or TheLounge can work like Slack for searching, file/snippet hosting etc in a more approachable manner.

So, you come to a new job and join a channel that has been around for 2 years. Design decisions and discussions from 4 months ago with the old tech lead are there. Does weechat give you access to those logs?

No, not by default but if your organization uses IRC then it would be near guaranteed that whoever set up the IRC server will enable logging on all channels and then likely give you a web front end to it so you can easily read and search through all of the history.

In other words, yes, in any reasonable environment you would have access to everything ever said in any logged channel.

So, someone is tasked with building and maintaining a small part of what Slack provides as a service?

I agree to what nickjj said but hopefully decisions like that are not taken in chat but rather on a mail or an issue so it is documented.

>netsplits, nick collisions

It really sounds more like you used IRC daily decades ago.

> Freenode has about 85,000 people logged in right now and there's over 50,000 channels.

lol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com