Hacker News Reader

Comment by kruhft | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's time to go back to IRC?

If you've gone down the wrong way, a step back can be a step forward.

I consider IRC a step forward over twitter. Real conversations, choice of clients, multiple distributed servers, fast. And if you use emacs it's just a M-x irc away (at least to connect to freenode).

Twitter has real conversations, a metric ton of clients, and is fast. Not sure what you're talking about here.

As for emacs, install http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TwitteringMode and M-x twit

True, but I think IRC will be around in another 10-20 years, twitter, not so sure. I can setup my own IRC server in an hour, can that be done with twitter? As you might have guessed I use IRC and have 'tweeted' about 10 times in my life not really getting this twitter thing, mostly because the simpler, older alternatives are just that much better. Of course, IMNSHO.

Depends on how you define conversations. As far as I am concerned Twitter's 140 char limit and fragmented exchanges don't allow for "real" conversations. As for clients, their function and choice totally depends on decisions taken by Twitter because Twitter is centralized.

That said, IRC will never be as popular as Twitter and probably doesn't make for a good business model. But it's all that kruhft said it is.

I have to disagree with you on that. 140 characters forces one to be brief and to the point (I'd almost say creatively brief). Links can be sent through URL shorteners, and if you really need to write a long message, then Twitter isn't the proper medium anyways.

There's nothing "fragmented" about exchanges on Twitter for quite a while now. If you click on an @message, you can see the entire conversation chain in the sidebar.

IMO having a "real", deep conversation requires the ability to write long messages. Thus, as you say, Twitter isn't the proper medium for that.

Your statement of "fast" confuses me. Minimum roundtrip for a write/reply/read sequence on Twitter is something like a minute. A conversation that would take five minutes on IRC can take several hours on Twitter.

>IMO having a "real", deep conversation requires the ability to write long messages.

Your definition of "real" is deep and long? Okay then.

>Minimum roundtrip for a write/reply/read sequence on Twitter is something like a minute.

Not in my experience. When using software tied into the API, I've gotten maybe 5-10 seconds lag between entering an @reply and having the client be notified of it. This was while testing, curiously enough, an IRC bot and Tweetdeck.

I think that "real", especially in scare quotes, brings along an expectation of depth, yes. Depth then in turn requires the ability to write longer messages.

As for the roundtrip, that's interesting. Perhaps it's just the clients (or the clients I use) that are slow.

You say "creatively brief", I say "broken". When I read Twitter exchanges (and yes, I know about the conversation chain), it reads almost like quaint 19th century telegraph: full of shorthands, "creative" ways to be brief, unintelligible loss of grammar sometimes...

I've had way more, and better conversations on G+ and Facebook because it doesn't artificially force you to dumb things down (or possibly worse, resort to unintelligible TwitSpeak).

And for extra fun, hook up M-x spook to M-x twit.

Ooh. I can see it now. A series of scripts which generates bogus accounts on twitter for the exclusive use of the spook command - the purpose of which is to overwhelm Echelon/Carnivore/$oppresive_monitoring_systems with false positives, thereby making any such surveillance prohibitively expensive and useless.

Better: let's revive the finger protocol.

Actually, that's not too bad of an idea. I remember years back with John Carmac's plan file being read by quite a few users. Much easier than keeping up a web page, plus no artificial limits. No conversation though.

Most terrorists I know keep a .plan

IRC would not be immune to problems like this.

No, but at least there isn't one central popular company that is on the constant monitor list. IRC allows for multiple disparate networks which are more difficult to take down (one goes down, another just pops up).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com