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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

As someone who grew up on Windows + mIRC + vBulletin forums (late 90s, early 00s), mIRC will always ignite fond memories :)

For those who still use IRC, but maybe on other platforms than Windows, HexChat could be considered a spiritual successor to mIRC, but it's also open source and available on a ton of platforms. Just a happy user here, not affiliated in any way.

Edit: Hm, seems it was some time ago I checked out the news/blog of HexChat, seems like last version was a year ago. I still use it without problems, but maybe people could share any active forks if they know about them?

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I'm unironically convinced that vBulletin forums are to date the highest form of discussing many topics online.

Not only they are alive and the best resource for many things (modding, hardware, radio, photography, specific car brands) but I swear 99% of work-related discussions would benefit from having a forum as their central hub, instead of the split of slack/teams/jira/mails/videocalls.

Hear hear, so sad that many forums disappeared, although as you say, many are still alive. The first (Swedish) forum I was active on, is still around with new threads being posted once every 10 minutes or so, and lots of active discussions. So it's not all doom and gloom, but I do agree I wish more communities used regular forums.

That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from? I would hate a vBulleting as a central hub, it's an information black hole, it's not suitable for tickets (jira), not suitable for real time communication (slack), and so on. It was a product of its time, but I think we found better solutions now.

> Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from?

As someone who still consumes threads like that, it's part of the charm and beauty. None of the stuff is ranked/upvoted/liked, no one is competing to have the most followers, just conversations/arguments between humans for the sake of communication and understanding. Requires a bit more time and effort to read, true, but everyone being equal makes it feel like a pretty OK tradeoff, at least for me.

Of course, not all forums are like that, some still have vanity-metrics, but at least the forums I still participate work like that.

There was definitely competition for most post count and some forums had reputation.

I don't think I've used any forums that at least publicly surface structured "reputation" although of course informal reputation exists everywhere, including forums.

Post count yes, that's pretty common. But if the forum you use is any good, they'd actively combat posts/threads that aren't actually contributing to the conversation.

One of the biggest and most active forum in Sweden is actually pretty good at this, probably mostly thanks to its ~100 iron fist moderators who do such a great job with cleaning up posts that aren't contributing to the discussions at hand. That it also have a really extensive set of rules also helps.

As a certified Swede - Which one is this?

Not sure I'd certify you if you're unable to recognize Flashback by description ;)

You basically can't give people numbers or statistics because invariably people will try to make that number as big as possible.

I'd forgotten how much I miss this. If you disagree with someone, you have to reply and explain why-- you can't just downvote and move on.

You're misinterpreting the role of the vote/downvote button I fear.

The upvote/downvote should serve the utility of promoting/suppressing relevant/irrelevant content to the discussion. It's a "vote what's relevant", not "vote what you agree on" button.

Also, if you disagree with someone you can just move on, you don't have to answer.

From HN's guidelines:

> Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion.

From Reddit's Reddiquette:

> If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it doesn't contribute to the community it's posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.

Sure, but when everyone else uses the upvote/downvote button that way it doesn’t matter how you personally use it. The end result is anything that goes against the hivemind gets suppressed.

I’ve had fully scientifically sourced rebukes of things (effectively, straight up facts) get downvoted to oblivion on Reddit. Hundreds or thousands of people didn’t see that their preconceived notions were probably wrong. It’s no wonder politics has become more insular.

HN is better than most, thankfully.

> HN is better than most, thankfully.

Indeed. Sometimes purely factual (but disliked/"too real") comments get like -200 upvotes, with no chance of redemption, even if it's pretty obvious everything is factual and adds to the topic.

Sometimes that happens on HN as well, but I've noticed that eventually it'll turn around. So saying something "true + unpopular + knee-jerk-inducing" can trigger a flood of 5-10 downvotes, but it eventually turns around as people seem to upvote heavily downvoted comments more, I guess.

With LLMs we are starting to get the technology where comments could be programmatically rated by more interesting scales than upvotes

Say something minimally negative about macOS in /r/macos. You'll be -1 in no time.

I'd like to see someone post the link of retail macOS 15 is not UNIX, only a bastardized version of macOS 15 configured in-house at Apple passed UNIX 03 cert.

Thread would probably die on the vine given the number of users in that subreddit who reference "it's UNIX"!

Reddit has entirely turned into a downvote == disagree/opinion I don't like.

I always thought slashdot had an interesting concept with meta moderators. Their job was to look at how someone moderated a comment and verify if it was moderated correctly. If it was that moderator was giving more moderation points (how many times they could up/down vote something). If it wasn’t they lost points.

You would be randomly asked to meta moderate random moderations.

I think something threaded similar to Reddit but without voting would be a nice middle ground. My biggest gripe with vBulletin style is how replies to earlier comments work and are so out of order.

I agree, these days I hate using forums that don't have a tree view. Unfortunately, I don't know of any software like that, except reddit.

We could score comments with sentiment analysis. AI, though not necessarily LLMs, can do it very well. Depending on how child comments reflect on the parent, the parent could be scored for relevance, agreement, helpfulness, or any other metric. This would also fuzz the metric itself (karma), and make it hard to game. The Goodhart's law problem in social media (karma farming, ratio-ing, etc) could be solved.

Of course, that presents many other problems. A corporation using AI to steer what discourse is worthy of promotion and what isn't in social networks has already caused much harm. Many things can be said about it.

But as a thought experiment, I think it's an interesting one. Much good could be done, advertisers and financial interests permitting.

Have we? I think vBulletin has mostly been replaced with Twitter and Reddit, which are often very difficult to surface information from.

I think the major advantage of old forums is the community. You don’t really get the sense of community on a large network, which causes a host of other problems.

Was it seriously the only way to read vBulletin forums? I could just fetch each whole >>1-1000 on old 2ch.net forum topics[1] and Ctrl+F anything I wanted. List of topics were Ctrl+F friendly too. There were party apps that could search all forums with titles, and fetch updates for all topics. vBulletin seemed nothing like that to me, was that really not me being outsider but just how it was?

  1: https://web.archive.org/web/20170728043031/https://egg.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/jisaku/1478413388/  
  2: https://web.archive.org/web/20170715143439/http://egg.2ch.net/jisaku/subback.html

> That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from?

There's rarely reasons for that.

Example on MBWorld:

https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/

Example from HWUpgrade (italian hardware forum):

https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13

I regularly read many forums to date and they are a great fit for long running discussions.

They are less confusing than slack/jira but easier to consume than email threads.

> it's not suitable for tickets (jira)

You can literally open a thread per ticket, same way you would open an issue on GH.

With good organization and barely any moderation you can go far.

I swear 20+ years ago we organized 80+ people World of Warcraft guilds all through forums (progress, economy, race-specific discussions, meetings, politics, website development, extensions, etc) and nobody ever felt like "yeah, it would've been better with a reddit/hn-style board or in a chat". Ever.

Yet today I'm split across 4 inefficient communication channels, plus another two/three different softwares for issues like GH/GitLab, documentation (confluence) involving half a dozen people lol.

Yeah, because 20 years ago we didn't know anything else. I also remember coordinating a guild via a vBulletin, and it was... fine. Would I do that today? Definitely not.

It's at least suitable as an archive. Tickets just end up being a place where information and lessons die once the problem is closed out. Sometimes impossible to find an old ticket without considerable searching.

I mean, have you tried to search a Facebook group, or any of the modern social media? There's not even any way to organize things, except for maybe some sticky posts. Forums were broken up into all sorts of sub-topics, and you could search them by actual keywords, and use real filters. These days the search just shows you shit that they want you to engage with, not what's actually relevant. A well moderated and curated forum is extremely easy to find information on without even searching.

You're 100% right though, it's not suitable for real time communication. I wouldn't want it to be. Facebook groups have "chats" now, and it's mega impossible to keep up, and nobody actually reads them.

They are terrible -- there is a reason you're using hacker news and probably reddit. The voting system is far superior to any FIFO out Pringles can of comments.

> there is a reason you're using hacker news

It's not because of the threaded comments with vanity-metrics, I can tell you that :) I've gone as far as to write my own HN client that displays HN comments as a flat list of comments, sorted by date that also folds in whatever they replied to as a proper quote, so you can follow along. Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png

Surely, I cannot be alone in sometimes going extreme lengths to remove this sort of pointless popularity sorting?

> Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png

This is super cool! I don't suppose it would be easy to share?

Atm, not easy indeed, it's hacked together code that barely works as-is, with a config that would be an even bigger mystery. Best hope is that I someday feel like cleaning it up and open sourcing it, alternatively you write something simple yourself :) Sorry!

I use HN and reddit because they are a source of interesting third party articles on random topics that then can be discussed in depth. Forums are a source of original discussion on a given topic. Those are very different things that meet very different needs.

> there is a reason you're using hacker news and probably reddit

It's a good place to talk stuff that's popular, but discussions fade and die quickly.

Also, I still use vBulletin-like forums.

Examples from the last decade I still use: mbworld.org for discussing Mercedes cars, bitcointalk, hwupgrade, overclockers.uk and some others.

Reddit/Twitter absolutely cannot replace any of those I listed for long lasting specific discussions, they are just unfit.

Voting systems indirectly operate as propaganda that tells you what to believe and how to conform with the hive mind. “Good thought” is conveniently found at the top with a large number of virtual points, “bad thought” is hidden for you at the bottom in harder-to-read colour.

I surely am not the only one that often skips to comments without even reading the article, which is tantamount to saying “I don’t have time to form my own opinion. Tell me what to believe about this topic”

I have a different theory about why people don't read the articles: we miss forums where you could just start a conversation about something because you want to discuss it. Most articles get submitted to reddit and HN because someone is saying "hey guys, want to have a conversation about _____?" and they get upvoted because people say "sure, let's discuss that!" and the article is incidental to that.

I think the flat list of comments is strictly worse than a tree for representing a conversation.

Although in other ways I do agree with your sentiment. The discussions happening there were usually of higher quality and nuance than you see online now. There are many factors to that though, including some that have nothing to do with vBulletin itself.

The problem with a tree is if the discussion gets long eventually several branches reach a point where someone being discussed in one is just a variation of what is being discusses in a different once and you need to bring the two back.

Yeah, there's no good/bad solution to this, albeit I would say that today an hybrid of a vBulletin-like forum with task planning capabilities (ala GH Projects, where pretty much every entity is a GH issue) with a sprinkle of AI you can ask stuff for would meet 99.9% of my needs.

A low-tech compromise that I find preferable to list or tree is what YouTube does, by having one-level deep trees.

How? I'm aware that it's the single most used forum software across the English Internet, but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use.

> but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use.

Sounds like a theme issue rather than vBulletin issue. Most of the vBulletin forums (of yore at least) were so heavily customized you couldn't even tell it was vBulletin, except for the ever present smileys :rolleyes:

Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't. More than considering what the "best" platform is, I wish my org would pick one thing in each category and stick with it. We don't need teams AND slack. We don't need teams AND zoom... I think that's where the real problem lies. It's harder to get comfortable with the software this way.

> Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't

Agree :) Consensus in the development community seems to be "Everything should be in Discord/Slack/Teams", so moving towards what you mention would be great.

> I think that's where the real problem lies

That certainly does sound like an issue, but I cannot say I've ever experienced it myself, maybe I've been lucky. At "worst", sometimes there is one tool for private/internal use, but for public community, Discord would be chosen, for example. But never "We're using both Slack and Teams internally", that'd be crazy.

The number of times a development community I want to join is exclusively on Discord though, instead of a public forum, is something I constantly encounter.

Discord it's a turd. It's a silo. And, if Discord deletes a group, good luck backing up your data. Gone. Forever.

People are pushing Discord to be something it's not.

Discord is a replacement for IRC and Ventrilo/Teamspeak/Mumble. It's NOT a replacement for forums or subreddits, no matter how much people try to push it as one.

Yeah, you can't easily back up all your discussions, but most people weren't doing that with IRC anyways.

Forums can be great, but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this". That makes it hard to follow the latest discussions. The few that do have that concept are great, search them out.

> but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this".

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but the way that normally works, is that you go to the last post you remember reading, then continue from there. So start at last page, go back until you remember what you're coming across, continue reading from there.

Probably only works for small/medium-sized forums though, the biggest forum I frequent only have ~20-40K users active and most (popular) threads die after 300-400 posts.

Every time I logged into a forum, it would highlight all the unread posts. The latest post pushed the thread to the top. I'm not sure what forums you used that weren't like that. PHPBB and vBulletin both did that by default.

I used (and ran) phpBB-based forums back in 2007, and even then it would tell you which threads have new posts for you to see.

HexChat has been explicitly abandoned, and the former maintainer didn't want it continued under other maintainers. No major forks yet, but Debian has a couple extra patches.

The maintainer did a public statement asking for interested contributors to message him but no one practical did.

I did and was rejected.

A year ago seems like very new when talking about an IRC client to me.

I started feeling bad about having used mIRC for 20ish years without paying for it so I switched to HexChat. It does everything I need and has a simpler interface, but I do sometimes miss the hacked up pirated copies of mIRC that were customized with scripts to do different things.

>Edit: Hm, seems it was some time ago I checked out the news/blog of HexChat, seems like last version was a year ago.

Pretty sure it's had security updates more recent than that, but I don't really pay attention.

wouldn't the more logical course of action be to pay for mirc? the devs do not benefit from you "no longer pirating" by switching to another client.

HexChat was maintained for a good 14 years and had a final release last year. It requires active community maintenance to stay alive:

https://hexchat.github.io/news/2.16.2.html

And my favorite mIRC plugin, ircN!

omg yes! ircN was the best!

Halloy is a nice IRC client. Written in Rust and has a beautiful icon.

Ah yes, Rust IRC clients of the 1990s always trigger my fond nostalgia of the old Internet.

halloy now supports image embeds too, which is awesome given that has become "table-stakes" with how prevalent Discord is

And it's time for my biweekly shoutout to iced, the wonderful GUI library used by halloy

https://github.com/squidowl/halloy

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced

Sometimes old things don’t need a rewrite just for the sake of language-based advertising.

>Sometimes old things don’t need a rewrite just for the sake of language-based advertising.

"X but in Rust" seems like the primary purpose for Rust to exist as far as I can tell.

Well, remember you always have the choice to be informed instead.

> seems like last version was a year ago

If it works, don't fix it...

I read HN in hexchat, on Libera.chat ##hntop...

hexchat definitely has roots on xchat which in turn was inspired by amIRC[0].

mIRC was at some point the most popular Windows IRC client, but that's about it.

0. https://www.amirc.org/

mIRC is more than that, considering its currently the only client with full IRCv3 support

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