Comment by hpaavola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hpaavola | Hacker News Reader

When ever I use Skype or Lync (things that I need to use at work), I really miss IRC. By default modern IM clients are constant source or distraction. Someone said something? Make sure to ring some bells and blink some notifications. Someone wrote an emoticon? Of course everyone wants to see slightly taller than line height image representing the emoticon. With animations, because why not?

I also really miss how in IRC channels are kinda the default way of communicating. I feel like Skype and others start from one-to-one communication and channels/rooms/... are more like a secondary feature.

If at work I need to ask some question, I do not care who answers to that and in many cases I do not know who has the answer. I do know what team or interest group might know the answer. With channel first kind of IM (IRC) I just join #folks-who-develop-the-server-im-sending-data-to and throw the question in the air. Eventually someone answers me.

With Skype, there is no such channel, because the mindset is different. So I need to browser the corporate intranet to figure out who might be the tech lead of the server I'm sending data to and contact that person. I chose the tech lead because he's the person who most probably knows the answer. Too bad that he is also the busiest one and I'm just making the situation worse.

Also, I really miss news groups. Why each web forum must reinvent the wheel and fail at it? :( I'm not that old, only 31. But boy where things better when I was younger. :D

Yup. I don't really miss usenet, I never was that invested. But I miss BBSs - and I prefer proper mailing lists to web forums (although I take a perverse pleasure in how HN leverages poor UX in an effort to meet its goals as a news site with comments, rather than a forum for discussion. Is there a hn-lovers mailinglist?).

I'm not aware of any platform that combines a reasonable API/protocol with a good web experience. I have some hopes for mailman3, is a bit sad that lampson appears dead, that edgewall killed their webmail frontend (I thought it might make a good basis for a proper web frontend to a proper mailinglist). And there is of course the D forums that as I understand it build on usenet news as the backend, and with some styling/templating might make a decent web forum.

FWIW, Skype supports the channel-focused communication style you describe. It's just a matter of company culture on whether there are channels for everything or you contact people individually. That said, having worked somewhere that used Skype channels and somewhere that used Slack, I prefer Slack. The Skype channel experience on mobile is terrible, and the Skype client on linux is a second-class citizen.

Pretty much all IM protocols have some channel functionality. It's just that the user experience in Skype and many other IM's is such, that it does not ecncourage users to join/create channel first. Rather they all try to get users to find their friends and chat one on one.

With IRC, all new users are told (by their friens and pretty much all tutorials) to join a channel first. Also web clients tend to ask user to give an channel to join before they can do anything. For me and many others IRC is channels first. Commercial IM systems are one-to-one first.

I'm currently testing HipChat for our corporate messaging software and it is "channel" centered(with a default lobby).

We currently use OpenFire/Spark, which I like but my users find the "room" (called conference on OpenFire I think) hard to use.

Slack also uses room features.

Edit: I just saw that MetaCosm already said it.

The good news is that Slack/Hipchat/Campfire seems to be bringing channel based communication back in the workplace. Most of the places that use them use it as the hub.

There are obviously lots of additional little features (emoticons, inline images, etc) -- but at least with Slack, you can setup an IRC connector and just use your plain old IRC client.

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