Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again
nymag.com
nymag.com
There is a comment in the story about cross platform woes and incompatibilities.
I've never managed to install Whatsapp on my computer.
But none of that goes away from the point of both being intuitive.
Like not being creative enough to read the same amount of information from ":)" and specific, rich, custom emoji like, I don't know, someone simply shrugging. That's some bizarre self-aggrandizement.
I encourage you to go on a Twitch channel and tell me the :) equivalent of all the custom Twitch/channel images you see in chat.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/14/17335670/twitch-emotes-mea...
Could you break these down for us?
The IRC communities speak for themselves. Pretty much all regulars, no new blood, tiny, and opinionated grouches that are kinda hard to stand. You'd think #javascript or #node.js on Freenode would be pretty big. Nah, I'm on there every day and it's about 10 regulars. I could list off the usernames off the top of my head.
To put that in perspective, my Slack community for people who like building MUDs has more regulars and it's hard for me to think of a smaller niche. If you're trying to set up a community and you think IRC is good enough and you refuse to offer alternatives, your stubbornness is only disserving your users and community.
I can think of many more options too, like how Elm's IRC channel makes you think nobody uses the language, yet Elm's Slack community is thriving and more fun to participate in than #javascript and #node.js, and is far more popular.
But today, it's a hard sell. IRCCloud doesn't compete on features against alternatives services, it's strictly worse since it has less to work with.
When a user adds your community, it gets added to a list of all their other servers on Slack/Discord. The question has become "so why are you making us use this instead of setting up a Slack/Discord/etc server like everyone else?"
And I think you'll be hard pressed to answer them in a satisfying way. And for no real gain.
Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad.
IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it.
If that changed the average HN user’s attitude would probably change as well.
"We keep logs of your IRC communications until you delete your account with us, or a connection, or channel. This means that, even if you stop using IRCCloud for a while, when you next log in, it will be as if you never went away."
> Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad.
> IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it.
Who exactly is "HN"? How did you even decide "HN" has opinion X or Y?
I'm fine with Discord because its mostly used for gaming. Given the previous options (Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Mumble, Skype), it is miles better. And of these, only Mumble is fully FOSS. A clear disadvantage is however privacy-related, but for gaming that isn't a huge issue.
What I'm not fine with is being forced to use Slack for work-related material. You don't want such sensitive data centralized. You want to host such yourself, or have the private keys yourself.
IRCCloud, whatever it is, probably does not have the same amount of users as the previously mentioned two. But if it uses the IRC protocol (which the name suggests), at least that is open and there's no vendor lock-in like with Slack/Discord. Which, given that Slack is used for commercial endeavors, is worse for Slack.
and immediately:
> IRCCloud, whatever it is, probably does not have the same amount of users as the previously mentioned two. But if it uses the IRC protocol (which the name suggests), at least that is open
IRCCloud is a centralised, closed-source entity that stores all your chat logs in the cloud. So, no different than Slack/Discord (with the exception of the protocol).
> Which, given that Slack is used for commercial endeavors, is worse for Slack.
How is it worse for Slack? Slack clearly provides value that IRC (and XMPP) don't. I really wish people would try and see why Slack etc. are popular and used (including in commercial settings), and why IRC/XMPP are not.
(A very important exception.)
IRCCloud just appears to be akin to a BNC. If Bob decides to use IRCCloud or a BNC that is his choice. The rest of the team or group can still use their preferred IRC client because the protocol is an open standard. Would it be my choice for an IRC client? Hell no. But thanks to the protocol being FOSS: to each their own. Try that with Slack/Discord...
> How is it worse for Slack?
Because whatever gamers discuss is much less privacy sensitive than whatever businesses (with for example other people's data) discuss.
I'm also not really sure why anyone would compare Slack/Discord with IRC or XMPP when its clear that these are so vastly different while there are FOSS, open standard solutions for Slack/Discord in existence such as Mattermost (Slack alternative) and Mumble (Discord alternative). You can't even do audio or video over IRC.
If just one team member uses IRCCliud for chat, all tgat sensitive info is now stored on IRCCloud’s servers.
So, hiw exactly does “open FOSS protocol” help in this case?
> What I'm not fine with is being forced to use Slack for work-related material. You don't want such sensitive data centralized. You want to host such yourself
The moment you use IRCCloud all that sensitive data is on IRCCloud’s servers. How does “building a protocol in top of that (on top if what?)” help?
Given we're talking in circles I'll withdraw from this discussion.
How can they enforce E2EE if very few if any IRC clients support it?
What good does “owning the data” do if the data ends up on IRCCloud’s servers anyway (companies who use Slack also own their data).
It’s quite telling that people have such a strong belief in the magic of protocols.
You say "HN has a ..." but I use Discord for fun and have no problem with it.
There's no one type of person on HN. :)
See comments to every mention of Slack, or other modern chat software. you will see a lot of people saying that IRC/XMPP was better and suggesting open protocols and IRCCloud :)
If someone can figure out Facebook (and trust me, Facebook is far from intuitive for someone who doesn't know) or any other web-based service, they can figure out IRC.
The main reason people do not use IRC much nowadays is that other people moved off IRC to Facebook and other social places. It isn't a technical thing, it is mainly a social thing.
Yeah you can set up some always-connected relay on a server and bounce your client through it to still get the conversation backlog when you weren't online, but it's not reasonable to expect an average computer user even have an always-connected machine to run it on, let alone actually get a relay working.
If they can use Facebook they could use IRCCloud, but that's $5/month and Messenger/WhatsApp/Discord/Slack are free.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have so many messages saved forever tho, honestly.
In IRC, anything that happens while you don't have an active session just doesn't exist.
That might work for some communities, like programming language groups where I can hop in, talk about something with whoever's online, and hop back off.
But if I'm chatting with my friends and we're trying to make plans for the weekend, everyone really needs to see that conversation regardless of whether they have the client running right this second.
This is exactly why people who are pro-IRC are watching the sun set on IRC and they don't have a flaming clue why beyond condescending suspicions like "it's the users who are idiots."
Other chat protocols fix this but lack the base, and are having trouble competing against the likes of Slack or iMessage in different use cases for example.
I'm excited to see how Purism's Librem 5 is going to play out with matrix as it's primary communications platform.
As far as I can tell it'll continue to exist for communities that are on it, or maybe for new ones that are deliberately trying to select for the kind of person who's willing to deal with IRC's limitations. Those are both perfectly valid cases, not everything needs to be aimed at mass market adoption.
But beyond those groups, there are lots of nicer services that most people would prefer to use for one reason or another. And even if the self-hosted and/or free software leaning groups, Matrix looks more promising looking forward.
I am a 30-somthing software engineer who doesn't use facebook. The few times I have tried it out it was indeed incredibly confusing.
There’s more native FBM options as well as Slack and Discord combined clients (Ripcord) though the latter might not look or behave the way people want.
Same for aim, icq... greedy killed all of those, not the ability to create better open clients. Namely msn and gtalk (not the jabber offering, which was a joke attempt of making federated icq for corporations, enterprisey java codebase and all)
IRC never had any channel discovery, so how does modern breed of group chats make channel discovery harder?
IRC does make a lot of things we now take for granted harder (file/image/video sharing, search, persistent history, mobile support...)
wot? It didn't have server discovery, but once you connected to a server, you could definitely discover channels.
Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).
2. There are many more “group chats” for the midern era. Ignoring them isn’t wise.
3. Even among those listed you have channel discovery, for example, in Facebook Messenger.
And no, a discussion on modern chats does not end with “IRC was better end of story”. It wasn’t.
Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).
Then you realize you only finished the 0.01%.
That's about where IRC seemed to have stopped. "We're done. The clients can do the hard stuff that users actually want."
Slack and its kin are v2, capturing the requirements that have changed with the changing userbase. I only wish they were standardized, so we could have non-first party implementations (with the benefits that come with that).
It’s hard to see a future for IRC or something like it to beat the proprietary alternatives unfortunately.
The new SaaS companies integrate what used to be two (three) separate things - the client and the protocol (and the server). The way they do this forces everyone to use the common client that's not optimized for power users. Which is kind of nasty, because it's the power users that have to suffer the interface the most, as we use it day in, day out at our dayjobs.
I too would have liked an open protocol in principle, but looking at emails I am not sure it would have been a good thing. (As in eternal backwards compatibility and unchangeable architectural choices that might not suit a very different future use)
Are you saying these messengers have a feature that splits the group in half at random intervals?
You should really submit a bug report to imessage and friends if they don't do that-- otherwise it degrades the reinvented IRC experience.
Difficulty of finding channels is sort of the point isn't it? Exclusivity and tightly knit communities?
Amusingly, I couldn't see why slack stopped doing IRC, essentially that's what it was. The one and only thing that let IRC down was the message limitation. Some clients didn't make it very clear when those messages were not sent.
I'd say approximately a third of the friends I chat to regularly (late 30s ish) have left or don't use Facebook - but we're all in lots of WhatsApp groups. A couple with big groups of friends, but lots that are started before a night/day when the few in the group got together and just stay open to extend the fun from the day with relevant stuff.
It feels a lot more private to post to these. You can share things without some random friend commenting, or judging because you know exactly who you're sharing with. It feels more like having a pint with a couple of mates than pinning something to a noticeboard that friends, relatives and work colleagues may (or may not, depending on whether FB deems it worthy) seeing.
WhatsApp has definitely replaced Facebook for a few of us - and bearing in mind they have the same overlord, it seems like a pretty canny buy now.
Google+'s misstep was to overlay a clumsy UI and load a lot of the work of setting up and maintaining those circles on the user. Neither do a lot of users have the clean line between "Close Friend", "Friend" and "Acquaintance" clear in their head.
I'm running a small site where people can play pen&paper-style roleplaying games together in small groups, featuring persistent channels and a wiki for each channel, in addition to the core dice rolling and chat functions (https://rolz.org for anyone who's curious). The site has survived the stunningly well-funded and abundantly feature-rich Roll20.net, because it's non-commercial and doesn't require user accounts. However, since Discord appeared on the scene, traffic has been declining massively and steadily.
Where we once had hundreds of groups online at a given time, it's now usually in the low 20s. At first, people kept asking for a Discord-bot version, and at least one user made one using the public API, and now Discord is pretty much the only game in town.
Meanwhile IRC is also pretty much dead, as many people have noticed in this thread. I still hang out in the #ludumdare IRC channel, but over the last two years that community has dwindled from hundreds of users during the Compo to maybe ten, and from dozens of users during the rest of the time to maybe 2 or 3 being online per day. While the LD Discord has replaced the IRC channel, it is also a lot less vibrant and social. It's now more a loose collection of mildly disinterested people who sometimes hang out in the same chat room, mostly unconcerned with each other. I wonder how symptomatic that is.
I'm glad to see this article articulate this. If you were thinking about something political, say Climate Change, and posted that, then you'd suddenly find yourself arguing basic facts with someone who dropped out of your highschool that you never got around to defriending.
Repeat post-argue-block until you can't muster the energy, and start posting trivial nothing like pictures of what food you are eating like everyone else - wanting social interaction but repeatedly slapped like a pavlovian dog until you don't know if it's even possible to have a real conversation online anymore.
Chats based on hashtags. Are you watching the newest Game of Thrones ? Just search for #gameofthrones and enter the chat to talk with others. Chats go bad once too many people participate, so you split chats into channels of ~50. You can upvote messages and once they reach a threshold they will be broadcasted to all channels. Broadcasted messages can be saved in an archive and reread later by everyone.
Monitization can be done by allowing people to pay for broadcasts.
Everyone can start their own chatroom of course but names are unique.
Please, someone do it, I want this. Discord is to cumbersome because you need to find an interesting server first and you have to commit to much.
Human social groups have a purported manageable upper limit of around 150 people, so super mass networks like insta, facebook, twitter etc also get to 'broadcast' level interactions rather than intimate discussions - it seems as though private group chats are a way to have a digital campfire, with less pressure & more shared experience.
There's so much behind building a social network that it takes a perfect mix of luck, timing, skill & marketing. But they will continue to come, won't they.
But I see this as an opportunity where you would split of the main chats by creating a more obscure named chat. Like you have a nice conversation with a few people and you can send them a private message "hey, lets continue this in #got-indepth" and then you invite others that you like.
You can have general conversations with a lot of people and break up into like minded groups naturally.
Moderation is a problem I don't know how to approach. Being able to ban people on a majority vote could be alienating.
I invoke Poe's law:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2811#section-2.1
"Channels names are strings (beginning with a '&', '#', '+' or '!' character) of length up to fifty (50) characters. Channel names are case insensitive."
Traditionally, people use channel names like #foobar.
(if you wanna know what the other prefixes are for:
& = local to server + = no ops, no modes ! = "safe channels", a rather esoteric concept related to protecting against special forms of netsplit abuse. Barely anyone uses these or knows that this feature even exists. I hope they don't throw it out with IRCv3, and instead just make it less... idiosyncratic.
I didn't mean using IRC (although you might of course).
And obviously it doesn't have to be a # character.
All that aside, parent is right, you're basically re-inventing IRC. A more user-friendly client may be a good idea, but it's something that's really hard to make money on, so it's unlikely anyone would bother working on it.
Anyway, as someone else let me now, kik intruduced exactly this feature with the exact same limit on users in one chat already.
> you split chats into channels of ~50
You are describing Kik
I'll try it out.
Would love to hear if you have any ideas on solving that. Besides that, I like the idea.
You could also use this as an opportunity for another monetization system which allows people to pay for a reserved channel and moderation rights. The owners would be incentivized to behave in a reasonable manner because people could just move to an umoderated channel if they don't like the administration.
I see the chats in a semi persistent state between reddit/discord and kik/jodel etc.
Not persistent over weeks or months but also not as short lived as a one day discussion that gets lost in new posts.
Facebook is going to be your rolodex (A "facebook" even! good name for it) and then there's going to be a heavily segmented private social network for your friends / families to connect and share photos. Figuring out how to make that happen with limited / minor work for the user is the challenge.
I'm sorry, but WTF does this even mean? That's so incredibly vague that I tend to read it as "essentially, nearly anything could be a TOS violation". For instance, if I log a call with "He was in a bitchy mood and was being an asshole", that is a TOS violation, since calling someone an asshole is widely considered unkind.
It is self-hostable, and provides a modern baseline of features (though Riot is the only fully-featured client at the moment).
Burying myself in a walled garden is a no-go, so it has been working pretty well for me so far. I only regret the fact that the reference server implementation consumes a lot of resources, but it should be coming down [1][2] (the current state stems from the proof-of-concept python implementation having grown unchecked over the years), with alternative implementations hopefully becoming viable soon[3].
[0]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients-matrix
[1]: https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/projects/9
https://https://web.archive.org/web/20180711050333/https://m... (Why they removed this, and many of the other entries, from their FAQ? Who knows.)
https://secushare.org/comparison
…nor a fan of Federation in general:
https://about.psyc.eu/Federation
https://secushare.org/federation
Of course, the perceived need for federation only arises in the first place because the 'Inter'net doesn't actually deserve the name "Internet"—it's just three bead on a string telco networks in a Trenchcoat held together by thought-terminating clichés, of which you'll find plenty over here (and I don't exclude my comment there from that description):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808
And a beads on a string model kinda forces one to enduldge otherwise mostly unnecessary middlemen.
Grrrrrrrr.
Discord is the lifeblood of a lot of gaming communities and a growing number of IT communities.
Granted, they increased usability significantly by doing this, but it comes at a large cost for people that value freedom and privacy.
Come on man, it's so hard to have conversations when people say shit like this...
Why HN thinks this is a moral failing and downvotes accordingly is, in my opinion, their own ignorance, not anyone else's.
Would you say that about freedom of speech, thought or movement? I'm asking because all of them are human rights. Do you think you have the moral right to give up on human rights?
https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...
Preamble:
"Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction."
I haven’t had a decent conversation with a stranger in years.
Step 2: Use it
2.) Don't be unattractive.
Seriously, find a community and dive in. Doesn't matter if it's virtual or facilitates IRL meetups. Reddit is always a good place to start. Lots of those subs have Discord servers for more real time communication. You can even start with a broader, unrelated community like a regional or city-based tech community, and then ask around for people who share similar hobbies.
No one can teach you how to make friends, but the changing Internet isn't the problem at that point.
I just find a bar or dance club I like, then I keep going by myself, or with friends. Doesn't matter. Make it a habit to get a drink, spend a little time there. Do whatever you want. Have fun.
If you're by yourself, people will usually talk to you first.
After a few times you go there, the regulars will know your face, you'll know them too, and conversation will flow quite easily.
"Hey I've seen you before. What's your name?" That's all it takes.
Another thing you can do, especially for travelers, is just pick up smoking. Marijuana, nicotine, doesn't matter. Go outside, find a spot where other people are smoking, ask if you can sit there. Say hi and ask everybodys name.
If its lack of confidence, just remember that we all act like idiots all the time, no one is perfect, and everyone is drunk. People like to meet people.
I have weirder ideas about this. I believe all conversation is telephatic. When we walk into a room, we sort of just know who is going to become a friend, who isn't, all that. If you feel someone is cool, just say hi. That person likely feels the exact same way even if they don't know why.
When we walk into a bar, we sort of just know we are going to go back. That it's going to become our place.
I’d even say it’s detrimental to always expect the latter from the former. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!
You have to be someone who people want to connect with. And if you stop being that kind of person you run the risk of getting kicked out.
Sites like Reddit, Facebook and especially Twitter have a bad reputation for taking people who said something slightly controversial and making them online pariahs.
These more private systems are safe from both drama fanatics and people looking for controversies, and from journalists looking for controversial communities to infiltrate and profile.
Push to talk/listen is popular in china as well and its insanely irritating being around people shouting at their phones to reply.
Sometimes I think of Vernor Vinge's book _True Names,_ where one of the characters is called the Mailman, and only deals with the world through email. That might be me by now...
For example, text boards and forums? Mostly dead. Imageboards? Even small sites dedicated to a particular obscure subculture are dying, the biggest ones are mostly ideological nonsense. Blogs? It no longer has a visible and influential blogosphere. Reddit? Primarily newsfeed and links. Also, lots of communities I was interested in was going downhill. Twitter? Lots of interesting things was happening in the beginning, but nowadays it's a mainstream walled garden, etc.
Even Hacker News had:
* I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-...
So I asked a friend online. He was once active in a technical community and specialized in writing tropes and jokes, but already stopped posting for a while.
I asked: What are you doing nowadays?
He answered: Busy works.
Then I told him my all of my perceptions I mentioned, and asked him: what the heck is going on for web communities? what is the future? what are the places where interesting things are produced nowadays?
He answered: I think it has returned back to the era of chatrooms.
I've realized his judgement cannot be too correct after seeing this article on HN.
Pretty much. I've heard a lot of activities is now happening on Discord servers, especially for gaming, it's almost the role IRC played in the early 2000s. Telegram also has many interesting groups and those dramas and incidents are coming on a weekly basis! I believe the chatroom would be a breeding group for the next wave of web communities.
In short, I guess we've just completed a full circle.
Unfortunately, what it means to me is:
(1) All the legacy of the previous web communities needs to be thrown away.
(2) It may take years for the new communities to recreate some interesting aspects of the old web communities had, and by the time you've rediscovered it, it would be too late.
(3) Most protocols and services and proprietary. Now a even bigger walled-garden is coming.
(4) I cannot be happy enough to see that Hacker News is still going strong. Registering an account was a correct decision. I think Hacker News is largely playing a role of the Usenet newsgroups, but in disguise as a news website. It may not be as effective as forums, but is working pretty well.
After this change I feel liberated. I am able to think more independently, avoid group think and have more meaningful 1:1 conversations. For now I am planning to stick to this change.
I tend to treat channels as faster paced forums, more or less.
"Buy this $800 iphone 10x-r so you can send animated images to your grandma & grandpa. Or run an app that puts an smiley imoge over your face"
I understand for some people this is a great feature. Or how about being able to 'unlock your phone' with your face. Great that is totally cool (not), but sure go ahead and drop a grand on the new iphone if you want to.
I dont really agree with the article. Technically these group chats might be sending info over the wire. But normally i wouldnt really associate a group chat with "the internet".