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Comment by rawoke083600 | Hacker News Reader

Man I wished we can go back to IRC, compared to the shitshow that is discord ! Slow client, stupid login circle-jerks, desktop-clients-vs-webclient and and and.

Yea yea I'm old, but dammit in "my day", it was easier to communicate and the "tech" didn't get in your way.

IRC was basically a "done product" and new features were usually spearheaded via "scripts" from users with a need.

It seems the "new features" in discord are product-managers trying to justify their job and keep adding feature-upon-feature and making it more of a xmass-tree-met-a-coder-on-crack situation !

I wished there was a product manager (I'm looking at you Spotify, netflix etc) that said, ok these next few quarters we are going to reward ourselves for 'REMOVING Features'.

We need the area of "Bring your own client" to really take off.

Ok i'm done venting (one should not comment before coffee on HN) :P

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I miss IRC too, but I don't miss the doxxing and DDoS nonsense. I don't have to setup a znc bouncer to connect to Discord. I don't have to take any precautions. It just works. I hate the client though, so I feel you on that. The lack of terminal integration with Discord is painful.

That is mostly solved with ChanServ and NickServ services. Channels can't be taken over with DDoSes because ChanServ protects them and attackers can't get your real IP because NickServ provides host masking.

It's such a shame IRCnet refused to adopt services.

Wasn't that already a thing in 2001?

I was on euIRC and basically "grew up" with those services.

Yes, they were a thing even in the 90's.

People can still get your ip and ddos you on discord. its just a little expensive. theres a forum where you can pay $500 for someone to send an EDR to Discord from a police email. Also there was a file attatchment bug in the wild that leaked your ip as recently as 6 months ago which im not sure was even fixed. A guy I befriended in a hacking community proved it to me.

$500 seems cheap to hire someone to impersonate a police officer. Isn't that go to jail for a long time territory?

Its a highly illegal felony, yes. but take into account the value of a human life is low as $226 in some countries. These operators are in foreign countries and dont care.

Who said they were impersonating? Police officers don't mind working on the side for a little scratch.

Man, I wish you would come back to IRC.

Who else started using it in 1996, and never stopped? Lots! Who else never touched any of the social media sites. Lots!

Discord is a frustrating UI experience for me on all levels, so I just can't bring myself to even open the software.

IRC was and is awesome.

Caveat: use it for casual socializing. If you need tools for risky things like political activism, business, security, etc - don't use IRC, for many reasons.

any good servers/networks you could recommend?

Libera chat is rad, though channels are a mixed bag on IRC servers. I've met awesome people with whom I've been in IRC channels now for... phew... 25 years, on Undernet of all places.

I find it hasn't changed all that much over the years, if at all, so some should be warned - it does remind me of the early wild-west days, which I love.

> I've been in IRC channels now for... phew... 25 years, on Undernet of all places.

List all the channels you're in.

No, thank you. But there are many awesome ones. And many that have been active since I joined... in 1996. When I left high school, I made friends on IRC. Many are my closest friends to this day.

IRC isn't dead or anything like that [1]. I use it every day. I prefer it over alternative instant messaging services, i.e. discord, slack, teams etc. It has no clutter. It is simple.

[1]: https://libera.chat/

There are I think two useful features things like Slack and Discord have brought to the table.

1. Pinned messages. Yes, to an extent Channel topics can serve this way, but the limited space in IRC leads to "Use !jabberbot help for a list of commands, and !jabberbot faq so we don't ban you for asking the same thing for the 40th time." Slack and Discord suffer from people who don't read pinned messages but it can at least help deflect repeat stuff.

2. Threading. In some contexts, it makes sense to take a follow-up loosely "private" in the sense of not messaging to everyone else in the channel.

Other than these IRC is superior in basically every other way.

I looked at the Clone Hero discord server recently and despite it using pinned messages and having a lot of info in Getting Started + FAQ channels, that info still gave many !commands for paragraphs of text and various images that were only available from the bot. I couldn't understand why.

I still use IRC, and I think that it is better than the other ones. I also use NNTP (I also have my own NNTP server for discussions about my own projects, but hardly anyone uses them so far).

> I wished there was a product manager (I'm looking at you Spotify, netflix etc) that said, ok these next few quarters we are going to reward ourselves for 'REMOVING Features'.

What is needed is to avoid adding bad features and avoid removing good features.

> We need the area of "Bring your own client" to really take off.

Yes, I agree. Allow that you can bring your own client, with your own features.

Make a protocol and file formats that is simple (but not too simple) and capable of better end user controlling, and then make the implementations, too.

(Also, some features can be made optional if that would help, too.)

>What is needed is to avoid adding bad features and avoid removing good features.

True, but reading change logs (I really like reading them), i very very seldom see "Removed feature xyz" but I do see "added abc X 10..n". I'm pretty sure no-one gets promoted by removing features in the current work-job-boss-promotion-setup.

What's holding you back? Name a network and a channel and booya. Just wait for the folks to join, i guess?

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