Except UX is everything. 100s of billions in corporate value are based on nothing more than better UX.
If only everyone who talks about usenet, IRC, and the rest could actually be bothered to update the experience to what modern users demand.
If only everyone who talks about usenet, IRC, and the rest could actually be bothered to update the experience to what modern users demand.
Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want. You could use a pretty eye candy client, or then not. With the web, however, it's an impossible feat to implement a standards compliant browser.
IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.
Scrollback and voicemail can be useful, but a good chunk of the population does not want either, hence unread backscroll and unconfigured/full voicemail boxes being very common.
The largest Freenode channels I'm on like #node.js and #javascript have about 10 regulars max, myself included. It's pretty much dead for any purpose other than hanging out with a handful of curmudgeons feeding off a corpse out of habit.
Doesn't seem like "a good chunk" to me. IRC lacks the only feature I really care about in a chat network: new people to talk to, users.
I wonder how many HNers who praise IRC only like the idea of it but don't even use it these days, either.
And I haven't even heard HNers bring up usenet outside of downloading free shit so I know that's especially dead wrt this thread as a decentralized Reddit.
So it always makes me chuckle to see "yeah, well, some people like it like that!" which is apparently virtually nobody. Or it's like how my two friends and I loved the failed, abandoned supermall in my hometown because the three of us could longboard down its parking garage.
What makes IRC good is that it's a text-only chat with a wide range of highly configurable, blazing fast clients. Not supporting images, quoting or reactions could be considered a feature, since these distract from the actual conversation at hand (consider newbies clogging the conversation with screenshots, or 100 people adding reaction emojis to a message).
IRC was all about conversation. You went there to have a conversation, like a party line voice bridge. You even waited around for someone to have a conversation with... oh I miss it...
Boomers demand attention constantly.
You might have a preference for one over another, or each might be appropriate for different situations. But to claim one is objectively terrible is ridiculous and only makes you look like you haven't taken the time to understand it at its most basic level, or you're too solipsistic to be able to recognize the existence of value in something outside of your own preference.
The UX in slack is not easily replicated in IRC (for example, how does/can global search work in IRC?)
Therefore, it is actually correct to say IRC is objectively worse in those measures. The only measure that IRC beats slack is the open protocol (which, if I'm being honest, not many users care,ala most existing chat services moved to private protocols and haven't lost all their users to IRC or xmpp).
Well it's a good thing Slack and Discord don't work exactly the same way but with a nicer UI and no need for a bouncer to emulate a persistent session.
These two words next to each other really bother me. That something is "terrible" is not objective, whatever that means. All we have are our subjective valuations.
Oh and binaries didn't go away, that's a feature and you just don't have to sync alt.bin.* if you want to avoid. I think it's great though for snatching rare/out of print stuff.
(There wasn't anything back in the '90s in the design of email to stop spammers from spamming, either; but enough people cared enough about email that billions were spent to add that spam-proofing. Nobody cared enough about Usenet to invest a similar amount, so it's still as unprotected as it was when Monica Lewinsky was in the news.)
> "Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want."
Make it happen. This is my other point. People complain that all these fantastic legacy technologies aren't used but nobody puts in the work to modernize and use them. If it was that simple, where are all the companies doing it?
Same reason why Gmail is a bloated mess, because that's what the metrics show is wanted by users.
Doesn't that just mean that users are spending more time on the site because it's so much more of a pain to get what they actually want out of it? Like, you could increase "user engagement" of a shopping mall by turning it into a labyrinth and rearranging the shops every day.
Also, Protip: in case anyone still doesn’t know, go to old.reddit.com for the previous, better interface. Who knows how long it will be kept alive though.
I'm using an extension to automatically redirect to the old one. When the old site is gone, I will probably leave Reddit, the redesign is too unusable for me.
I like HN but I miss the diversity of conversations. /r/synthesizers /r/starwarssleaks etc.
You don't need megabytes upon megabytes of nonsense just to avoid some full page loads. Or take al ook at something like HN where it's light enough that a full page load isn't a problem.
I don’t think most people know how to handle anything but an infinite scrolling page.
I'm sure they lose some users but they've gained far more than they've lost so far.
I've been on the new design, trying to give it a chance, for over a year trying to give it a chance, and I still have to often switch to old.reddit.com to do some things.
1. The new interface still doesn't have the "other discussions" link to show you discussions of the same link in other subreddits. I think they said something like a year ago that they realized this was important and it was coming soon.
2. The new interface messes up scrolling on Edge on my Surface Pro 4 when viewing a discussion. Actually, for this one you don't have to switch to old.reddit to work around. All you have to do is hit refresh. When you refresh while on a discussion, that switches from the view that shows the discussion in an overlay on top of the thread list, to a more traditional page that just has the discussion. That page doesn't fuck with scrolling. Depending on how much I plan on reading and how long the discussions are, I may or may not get annoyed enough with this to just give up and switch to old.reddit.
(BTW, that discussion as overlay view also fucks up in-page search, because the thread list is still on the page, just hidden from your view--but not the browser's search functions--behind the discussion view, and so the search hits those hidden items).
The only thing I can find in the new interface that is actually functionally better than the old interface is the fancy pants editor. Aside from selecting tools/commands not always always working if it has to put them on the "..." pop-up, and it sometimes losing the ability to scroll the text being edited via the mouse, the new editor is a win.
If they would just put the new editor as an option on old Reddit, I think a lot of people would be happy.
the A/B test isn't telling you that users like something, only that its taking them longer and they didn't bounce.
There have been some really good modern Usenet clients. The biggest issue I see is that current browsers don't have built-in support for Usenet any more, and that's not something I can influence in any way.
I see you haven't visited Reddit lately ;)
Look, I loved Usenet back in 1994, it was one of my first great Internet obsessions. But it effectively died in terms of relevance before the turn of the century. The majority simply preferred web forums.
Usenet was always a pain to use, posts would routinely get mangled or dropped entirely, and the multiple user-driven quoting conventions and wonky clients made any long-lived threaded discussion impossible.