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Comment by hvidgaard | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the things that "old school" people completely miss, is convenience. Your examples of Discord and Dropbox are two very good examples of that. They just work. They work on workstation and mobile devices alike. I totally get why people choose that.

I think the sad thing is that the free tools could be close to that and with careful open standard planning, it could even have for-profit companies participating. Email is one such example. Chat and screen sharing should have been another.

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> it could even have for-profit companies participating

Why would they?

edit: "Old school people" don't "miss" convenience, they would love convenience. Instead they have standards and platforms that are sabotaged or abandoned when convenient by companied building lock-in. What we get was built by people in their spare time, or chiseled out of academic funding, and though it often sucks we should be thankful for it.

I think the chance that anything on Discord will exist in 10 years is probably about 2%. If Discord exists (25%?), they'll have blanket deleted old data multiple times by then. Not that it matters much, because finding anything old on Discord is impossible anyway.

If tech heads valued convenience enough we would see some solutions in the space. Instead they spend their free spare time on a million other things - and that is okay. But they really shouldn't be surprised when non tech people use Discord over IRC, or even when young techies do to work on other things they find more interesting.

I don't understand this. Older protocols don't keep any state. Many people were quite upset when old Usenet archives came online. IRC, XMPP, by default, servers don't keep any state.

So why is that Discord would be required to keep state?

And then the freenode story shows, even if you effectively lock up all meta data. People still think IRC is great and move to the next network.

You know what also "just worked" on Windows, Linux, MacOS and mobile? Skype.

The old version yes - but it has gotten worse and worse over the years unfortunately.

And what makes you think the story with Discord is going to be any different?

Discord is the core product for the company that owns it. Skype was just another product for Microsoft. So the owners of Discord have a much stronger incentive to keep it functional.

Their primary incentive is for it to be lucrative.

Skype was the primary product of Skype Inc. They were bought by Microsoft. Since Discord is VC funded, they are probably also going to be bought up.

I'm not saying that. What I am saying is that right now, it just works. And when it doesn't and something else "just works" people will use that.

Why can't we stop this perennial cycle of "let's act like minions who follow the one with the shiniest object while they drive us all into destruction" and start taking responsibility for our choices and actions?

This whole thread started because someone took at jab at "old developers", and I'm really trying to avoid a rant against Gen-Z... but man it's unbelievable how conformist this generation is.

One would expect that a site called Hacker News would have an user base that does not accept the status quo, but here we are in a thread where defending "convenience" is the rule when it should be the rare exception.

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