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Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

> Today's chat client is a lot more complicated. Sure, go back and use IRC from thirty years ago. Do you remember all those commands? slash-something?

Not a lot. A tiny bit. They are still displaying text and a few images, and struggling to do even that (I wonder if Slack still needs 20% CPU to display an animated GIF). And yeah, slash commands are stil there.

> Go download MP3s and put them in your folders and use a command-line program to play them back.

Yes. We can play them back with Winamp which has all the bells and whistles that modern players have, for a fraction of resources.

> Software is not getting worse.

Current software struggle to do many of the same things that software of 20 years ago was already doing even though modern software has several magnitudes more resources.

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I don't think it's a tiny bit at all! Compared to IRC, chat services nowadays have

-server saved history

-custom user uploaded emotes

-threads and channels

-native gif and video support

-image embedding

-voice and video streaming

-complex automation apis

-detailed and comprehensive moderation systems

None of these are optional or superfluous. If you wanna go back to everyone having to run their own bouncer, approximately 5 people will join you. Tell them that they can't even have emojis and your probably down to 0.

I don't want any of those, and they annoy me when I'm forced to interact with them.

Oh irc can handle emojis :)

Even your phone is a magnitude or two faster than the computers running IRC.

Do you really truly think that all you listed is or somehow should be difficult on modern hardware? Or that the truly abysmal performance that modern chat apps exhibit can somehow be justified because they embed things many of which are either handled by hardware (images and video) or by the server (states, history, automation)?

Slack is an expensive software. I expect performance and yet, I can't find messages, I have a hard time to use slack and run IDEs at the same time, they change the interface and I lost 2-3 days until adapt.

If I could save some bucks removing videos, emojis, voice and video streaming, I would not hesitate in do so.

You got a fair point on how things work: it's all about communication. You want to stay where everybody is, so the incentive is to capture market, not make a fast software.

I think that most of the innovation effort in the last decade was on how to delivery fast.

>> Not a lot. A tiny bit. They are still displaying text and a few images, and struggling to do even that

Pretty ridiculous oversimplification. Hard to take posts like yours seriously tbh.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38765370

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