Fun fact, Google uses IRC as a communication channel for incidents[0]. IRC is stable, simple to host and connect to, and easy to log. So all of Google could be on fire, but the incident responders have a simple tool to use to communicate that likely won't die.
Avenues for that already exist. But the signal from those kinds of things is so so low compared to the noise that you often need multiple layers of moderation and filtering before anything useful.
A direct line from $random user to the on call is a recipe for disaster (ie your sres quitting) when you have many users. Engineers aren't first line tech support and those roles shouldn't be confused.
Of course. And my thinking when posting my first comment was the cliche critique that Google has no human tech support. I wrote it a bit tongue in cheek after trying to get a human at another tech firm for several weeks now.
I fully understand what you're saying and mostly agree. Thoughts on having registered users of certain products having access (e.g. Domain purchasers, Google app admins [office? What is that product suite called these days?])?
Then this doesn't solve GPs problem (being able to communicate with insiders) and leaves the problem of needing to worry about all communication being public. That means people's names, commands, tools, architecture, etc. Which is certainly something I'd be curious about, but there's no good reason to take those risks.
The game Warframe uses IRC for its in-game chat. They've obfuscated the authentication though, so it's not possible to just login with something like irssi. I'm sure other games do this as well.
Osu! also uses IRC for it's game chat, but it's not obfuscated . IRC is good enough for game chat, you don't really need anything more, unless you want to integrate voice-comms too. Actually, I once made multiplayer-over-IRC in a game jam, as the interface is so simple and flexible.
As a person who has to use Slack (and its walled garde) every day at work, I miss the simplicity of IRC. I think it probably lost out due to stagnation when it came to features and ease of use for the technically non-inclined. But at least it was (and is) completely open.
I still run a pretty basic ejabberd on Fedora. I've heard better things about Prosody, nowadays. (A while back I didn't transition to it due to some incompleteness in IPv6 support, but I'm told that that has since been fixed.)
[0] https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/managing-in...