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Comment by transcriptase | Hacker News Reader

If any modern software company was given a spec sheet for Ventrilo (https://www.ventrilo.com/about.php) and asked to develop it, you would get back a few hundred Mb installer that needed to download additional components, would send telemetry to their servers all day and check for updates, add background services to startup, and consume half a gig of ram while continuously managing to use a percent or two of your CPU at idle and probably even tapping the GPU to do god knows what.

Meanwhile Ventrilo 3 has a 5.4 Meg installer, consumes 4 megs of RAM, and does none of those things. The newer bloated version has a 7.9 meg installer.

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It should be noted that Ventrillo requires DirectX. This is part of where the "hundreds of megs" are hidden.

Though honestly, crossplatform software too often just bundles Electron rather than relying on the entire OS layer (on Mac and Windows anyways) having all of this stuff built-in. For bugs and reproducibility it's nice, but it really sucks for "downloading the same bytes over and over again". This is downstream of OS vendors just historically not fixing bugs, but in an alternate universe people would have working OS stacks and we would use that.

I’d much rather have to redownload the same bytes a few times than have the program I need not work on my OS.

Ventrilo (client) also:

1. does not run on Linux

2. the macOS client is incompatible with many servers

3. has been in development for twenty-one (21!) years

It also has such a bad UX that few people use it anymore.

Everyone moved to Discord which does all the things the parent complains about, but somehow it’s still a better product. As if most people don’t really care about those, for the better or worse.

This is one of the luxuries of developing only in-house software for a business. You have none of the incentives to add consumerware bloat, and in exchange you get all that extra time to refactor and focus on making things svelte, performant, scalable, documented and concise.

As much as any company is willing to load their customer-facing or retail software with a million kinds of garbage, that's the last thing they want in their own toolkit.

One of my personal career mottos is to focus on a secondary objective, as I’m miserable with all the mess going on around the primary objective.

One of the things that inspired that was seeing how much better the mobile version of websites often were than their apps. Thinking about Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and similar. Their apps don’t have tabs, often drop state, and seem to occasionally focus on shiny over usable. My local newspaper prevents you from copying any text in the app. The mobile websites on the other hand tend to mostly have an annoying “our app provides a better experience” banner to bypass, otherwise they’re engineered to work, not push the envelope. They’re important enough for some resources, but it doesn’t seem like there is quite as much noise during the development for the ‘fallback version’. And I think that makes all the difference.

Highly dependent upon the app. Unfortunately the Instagram mobile website is atrocious. It's so bad I can only assume it's intentional on Meta's part because they'd rather drive us to their native app for tracking purposes.

Even after reading first 4 paragraphs of your about page, I don't have any idea what your software does.

Should have kept scrolling to the massive bulleted list filled with features.

ok, can you please explain in 2 sentences what the software is? Like MS Word is a software to compose documents, or KeePassXC is a password manager, for example. Is it too much to ask from an "About" page?

Under the headline (all at the top, next to the logo) it says "Surround sound voice communication software". So fancy Skype ;-)

But yeah, that page is not for people who have no clue! But maybe that's not that bad? Idk how many who comes to that page having no clue what that webpage is about, but I would guess a very tiny percentage. Maybe it makes sence to assume that the wast majority ending up there knows the basics already.

Ventrilo is voice chatroom software (like discord) that is self-hostable.

It's been around for 21 years, has a wikipedia page [0], and is mentioned in at least one old meme-worthy DOTA song [1], so the OP likely didn't feel it needed an introduction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventrilo [1] https://youtu.be/qTsaS1Tm-Ic?feature=shared

I’ve never heard of it. Just looking at the website it looks like it hasn’t been updated in the last 20 years.

It's no longer self-hostable.

I didn't expect to see Ventrilo anywhere ever again after they've torpedoed themselves off the market when they've stopped distributing their server binaries and people could not self-host anymore.

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