Comment by slver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slver | Hacker News Reader

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> You are pretty young, right?

No.

> IRC is still the only group chat technology that I use semi-regularily. Slack, Discord, Matrix, FooBar, and the next yet unnamed hype can very well stay where they are. I dont care.

I don't understand why when I make a statement about the overall state of something, there's always this one guy who replies "oh yeah, you're wrong because I something, something".

I understand every person is a universe and to them their PoV is the only thing that matters, but we need to be a little less egocentric when analyzing overall trends.

I didn't claim there's not a single person using Freenode in this thread. In fact I've also used IRC from time to time recently. And I can compare how it was 30 years ago and how it is today. Today, it doesn't matter. The regulars who were there decades ago are still there and literally using IRC to their last day on Earth. And the rest have largely moved on. And thing is, the regulars don't make a self-sufficient community on their own.

You can be all like "them kids and their Slack, Discord, etc." all you like and these services DO have short half-life. What you fail to realize is that IRC is not an exception.

To me, IRC is an exception because it has no inherent accessibility problems, like all the modern chat platforms have.

Here is an experiment: Find a blind person and make them join your favourite discord or slack channel. Make them participate for real. Not just login and logout again. Now, do the same experiment with IRC.

10 years ago, this phenomenon was called digital divide. These days, people like you call it the inevitable future.

I like the concept behind IRC as a protocol with a set of independent networks, clients.

You see, I'm not arguing what we have today is better. In many ways, it's worse, and I'm sick of proprietary HTML-based interfaces and this endless flood of pointless features and monetization attempts.

But there's the fact: a social platform lives or dies based on the "social" aspect of it. This is why Facebook is making the billions. Not because it's the best, but it has the most people.

Maybe I am just different. I never liked the mainstream. I never liked too well known festivals. My experience is, if almost everyone is there, I dont want to be.

Great. But let's roll back to my initial point that the drama around Freenode is disproportionate to its relevancy. The fact you don't like too relevant things kind of isn't a counterargument.

I dont know how you want to measure relevancy. The topic is likely relevant to those which are still using IRC actively. Since you seem to imply in your messages that you have moved on and left irrelevant technologies like IRC behind, I guess it is save to assume it isn't relevant to you as much. However, standing up and claiming "this drama" (with a derogatory tone) is irrelevant smells a bit of egotistical behaviour. Of course it looks irrelevant to you, and apparently the world has to agree with your view since you are a member of the majority.

Why are you wasting your time talking here, when Facebook has billions of users?

I don’t care what happens to this site.

From the site guidelines:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate

The major problem is not that your opinion on the state of things is wrong (which it can't be, it's just a value judgement). But such comments do not belong here, regardless of if others agree or not.

I have no idea how these quotes apply to what I said.

So does that make email the only exception? What about HTTP? or FTP (now sftp)? Are they exceptions too, or maybe they're not actually the same, and are just base protocols?

There are exceptions and probably in a parallel universe IRC is all the rage with very few changes.

I think the issue is that HTTP and the web platform are so flexible, that we've stopped evolving dedicated protocols and just slap everything on HTTP and then eventually use mobile and desktop apps to cover the rest.

This also allows companies to build walled gardens where you register with them, they provide the service, and they control it. Which obviously has a strong investment/monetization incentive, compared to an open protocol like IRC.

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