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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I'm interested in.

I understand spam is a problem, but its such step backwards from just subscribing to alt.whatever.

The glory days when NNTP was built-in to most email clients, so mornings were spent with a cup of coffee answering emails and keeping up with project conversations.

The future of our world looks to be hyper-siloed with incessant privacy leaking and no one actually seems to mind.

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"It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I'm interested in."

The Freenode IRC network is full of developers and users providing support for open source projects, and is still highly active.

For example, Freenode's #ubuntu, ##c, and #vim channels have about a thousand users each, and plenty of them are developers. There are plenty of channels for smaller projects too, usually with developers of those projects hanging around and answering questions.

Come join us! Sure, it's not Usenet, but it's not a proprietary walled garden like slack, discord, or telegram either. You can actually keep text logs of the channels you're in and IRC clients are pretty full featured. The only thing I miss from the proprietary competition is embedded images/video, the lack of which is sometimes actually a plus.

Thank goodness for gmane. I hate mailing lists with a passion when nntp does the same thing with less overhead. Plus, when you join a group, you get to see the entire history. It's hard to reply to a message you do not have.

As a corollary I plan on writing a rfc to add SNI support to nntps, so you can virtualhost newsgroups for different domains (e.g. nntps://news.example.com/announce and nntps://news.corp.com/announce can be served from the same IP but refer to different groups).

It's not just leaking. You cannot use Discord anonymously.

Signing up for a new Discord account via Tor means you are prompted for a phone number, which is a single API call to a data broker away from full name, email, and home address.

You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital equivalent of showing an ID.

A lot of us mind. We're just being excluded from more and more conversations.

> You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital equivalent of showing an ID.

This only happens via Tor and oft-abused VPN providers. "Showing ID" has two benefits:

1. It helps mitigate a lot of unsophisticated spam attacks, taking off server load and annoyance off users.

2. It helps to some extent with mitigating criminal affairs because any potential criminal that falls in the gap between "doesn't realize IP addresses may leak location information" and "knows how to use compromised hosts as proxy" can be picked off by the authorities once they're noticed.

Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt and we don't get a choice. At least there's some minor upsides to it.

>Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt and we don't get a choice. At least there's some minor upsides to it.

The choice starts with us, the developers building this antisocial software. The industry is in desperate need of a collective attitude adjustment before we pass the event horizon of the quickly approaching tech dystopia.

Excluding those who do not identify has a whole host of downsides, which far outweigh the benefits in times of crisis.

Anonymity is not gone. You’ve just rejected it, and that’s fine. Many of us still live in ways where our private lives remain private.

It also helps discriminate against all participants who require or prefer their human right to privacy:

https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...

You don't have to enter a password or email to use Discord.

I am more disturbed that these groups are not search index-able. If you want to find an issue that someone encountered in a game for example. You won't be able to search to find it.

You can to some extent by searching Google groups (which would include posts to usenet). It doesn't work very well in some cases though.

Oh I was referring to the new communication channels such as Slack and Discord. They are not publicly searchable whatsoever.

> I understand spam is a problem

From what I've seen in numerous channels for software projects on freenode, spam is not a problem on IRC. A project choosing to use discord/slack/etc instead of IRC is a real disappointment.

IRC lacks backscroll. Even if you park a bot in your channel to act as recording secretary, there's no low-friction means of getting at that history without going out of band. This means that spam doesn't persist... but neither does consideration and consensus.

These are properties IRC loosely shares with traditional face-to-face discussion. I honestly don't see it as a significant problem.

There are several client options that make it low-friction if you want.

It's occasionally. Freenode has a few days a year when someone is running a big spam campaign and everyone scrambles to get up defenses against it until it dies down.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've noticed it, and I've been on freenode for the better part of two decades. Sometimes people spam, but it's such a minor problem that this cannot possibly be a rational reason for people to avoid freenode.

It's equally annoying that to sign into discord you need to disable your ad blocker and solve a series of google captchas.

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