Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com