Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jodrellblank | Hacker News Reader

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This is what boggles my mind. We're talking decades of arguments and discussions, dozens of different ways to do it, with dozens of tradeoffs that you could start listing with 20 seconds of thought, and still people just pop in like "why isn't it simple??" as if that's some award winning insight.

Come on, try! Start listing some of the core features of the different protocols/clients and answer your own question as to why it isn't simple! Presence. Chat history while offline. Threading. Mobile devices. Intermittent/mobile/cellular/wifi/CGNAT connectivity. Multiple clients on the same identity and presence. Identity establishing and confirming. Encryption. End-to-end encryption. Backing up and restoring chats, encrypted chats, group chats. Federation. Friends/groups/permissions/trust boundaries. Markup, markdown, formatting, images, emoji, unicode, code blocks. Audio, video, broadcast, multicast. Discovery. Extensibility. Federation. Store-and-forward.

> "We've been sending text over the Internet from the moment the Internet went online"

And IRC has RFC 1459, RFC 2810, RFC 2811, RFC 2812, RFC 2813, RFC 7194 and it does almost none of those things.

And you can still use IRC. But IRC is not good. At this point it's either wilfull ignorance of what people use computers for, or it's indistinguishable from deliberate trolling.

Threading? God, I hate threads in a live chat. Is it never not awkward to use? Slack is the example I'm thinking of, though I'm sure it's shit everywhere else too. In Slack, rather than display the one threaded reply just below (maybe indented), it makes me go to another window, but then someone else is replying non-threaded, so I have to bounce back and forth for the next 10 minutes.

I completely agree. Threads in Slack should be a great way to make conversations easy to navigate but damn did they fsck up ever part of the UX:

- opening threads in a new window is in some hard to find and hard to remember location

- threads can’t be inlined (like you’ve described). I actually like how they’re in a pane to the right but sometimes that causes issues (as you’ve described). Sometimes it’s just that the view is too narrow.

- there’s no way to shift non-threaded comments into the thread. I’ve lost count of the number of times conversations have happened over multiple threads and/or non-threaded replies.

The way they implemented it is a complete clusterfuck.

As an anecdotal counter-point, I love threads in a live chat. When used correctly, it means when my idiot friends start having a heated discussion about some random topic while I'm at work, I get one 'ding' from my phone and then never again until I start interacting or they @ me. As opposed to the 427 new notifications I get on my phone about whether Golden Eye was better than Mario Kart 64.

Ultimately the tech is only as good as the humans that use it. If you're chatting with folks that can't understand the difference between a thread or not, that's a meat-bag issue and not anything an RFC can fix.

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