[sha666sum]

You know, the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. I don't know if you've had a look around you lately, but the modern internet is a dumpster fire.

Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want. You could use a pretty eye candy client, or then not. With the web, however, it's an impossible feat to implement a standards compliant browser.

[Alex3917]

> the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand.

IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.

[mehhh]

I disagree with your false equivalency. IRC is akin to a cellphone without voicemail, as when your disconnected from the network (cellular or IRC) you just don't get communications.

Scrollback and voicemail can be useful, but a good chunk of the population does not want either, hence unread backscroll and unconfigured/full voicemail boxes being very common.

[hombre_fatal]

>but a good chunk of the population does not want either

The largest Freenode channels I'm on like #node.js and #javascript have about 10 regulars max, myself included. It's pretty much dead for any purpose other than hanging out with a handful of curmudgeons feeding off a corpse out of habit.

Doesn't seem like "a good chunk" to me. IRC lacks the only feature I really care about in a chat network: new people to talk to, users.

I wonder how many HNers who praise IRC only like the idea of it but don't even use it these days, either.

And I haven't even heard HNers bring up usenet outside of downloading free shit so I know that's especially dead wrt this thread as a decentralized Reddit.

So it always makes me chuckle to see "yeah, well, some people like it like that!" which is apparently virtually nobody. Or it's like how my two friends and I loved the failed, abandoned supermall in my hometown because the three of us could longboard down its parking garage.

[tyri_kai_psomi]

"I have never experienced this thing, therefore this thing must not exist"

[untog]

"I like this thing, therefore a sizeable chunk of the population must too"

[sha666sum]

I agree.

What makes IRC good is that it's a text-only chat with a wide range of highly configurable, blazing fast clients. Not supporting images, quoting or reactions could be considered a feature, since these distract from the actual conversation at hand (consider newbies clogging the conversation with screenshots, or 100 people adding reaction emojis to a message).

[joewee]

Young people now think it’s ok to send out a message and respond whenever they feel like it. Communication is no longer a conversation in the tradition sense, it’s a series of monologues or statements where the sender usually only cares about whether you are impressed by the statement.

IRC was all about conversation. You went there to have a conversation, like a party line voice bridge. You even waited around for someone to have a conversation with... oh I miss it...

[iikoolpp]

> Young people now think it’s ok to send out a message and respond whenever they feel like it.

Boomers demand attention constantly.

[ekianjo]

No. you just connect to an always on session like TheLounge and you have an IRC with the features you want. Pretty simple.

[manigandham]

This is like the famous comment in the "Show HN: Dropbox" thread that said you could just use rsync/ftp/git instead. Meanwhile Dropbox is now worth over $8B.

[ekianjo]

Not sure why the value of anything makes my point invalid? I answered there was a simple way for anyone using IRC to keep sessions alive and therefore not miss any message. This is an off the shelf solution, not something you have to build by yourself.

[manigandham]

Because it's a workaround, and shows just how far apart the legacy tech is from a modern experience.

[gdulli]

Synchronous and asynchronous communication both have their fundamental strengths and weaknesses. In a chat room you have the possibility of a real-time back and forth. That's invaluable at times.

You might have a preference for one over another, or each might be appropriate for different situations. But to claim one is objectively terrible is ridiculous and only makes you look like you haven't taken the time to understand it at its most basic level, or you're too solipsistic to be able to recognize the existence of value in something outside of your own preference.

[chii]

Slack is a superset of IRC, except for the protocol not being open.

The UX in slack is not easily replicated in IRC (for example, how does/can global search work in IRC?)

Therefore, it is actually correct to say IRC is objectively worse in those measures. The only measure that IRC beats slack is the open protocol (which, if I'm being honest, not many users care,ala most existing chat services moved to private protocols and haven't lost all their users to IRC or xmpp).

[reificator]

> IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.

Well it's a good thing Slack and Discord don't work exactly the same way but with a nicer UI and no need for a bouncer to emulate a persistent session.

[throwaway8879]

> objectively terrible

These two words next to each other really bother me. That something is "terrible" is not objective, whatever that means. All we have are our subjective valuations.

[Alex3917]

What I meant was more like, when viewed impartially rather than through the lens of nostalgia. Two people can do that and still have different opinions.

[flukus]

Your use case is what mailing lists or usenet are for, of course IRC is an objectively terrible mailing list, it's also an objectively terrible toaster.

[smacktoward]

Usenet turned into a dumpster fire even more quickly than the Web did. It was completely overrun with spam and binaries by the late '90s.

[joecool1029]

However, the spam mostly died off now. It's possible to have great convos with boomers complaining about each other finally. A small number of people came back because of the pseudoanonymous qualities. Honestly the only thing that really sucks is Google Groups users bumping 15 year old threads.

Oh and binaries didn't go away, that's a feature and you just don't have to sync alt.bin.* if you want to avoid. I think it's great though for snatching rare/out of print stuff.

[smacktoward]

The spam died off because Usenet died off. If users ever went back to Usenet, the spam would come back again behind them. There's nothing in the design of Usenet that can stop spammers from spamming.

(There wasn't anything back in the '90s in the design of email to stop spammers from spamming, either; but enough people cared enough about email that billions were spent to add that spam-proofing. Nobody cared enough about Usenet to invest a similar amount, so it's still as unprotected as it was when Monica Lewinsky was in the news.)

[manigandham]

Modern internet is both good and bad. Depends on the site. Generalizations don't work. However if those technologies are to ever be popular than they'll need to be redesigned to keep pace with what the vast majority expect, which is in response to the OPs comment. Otherwise you can already go post on usenet right now.

> "Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want."

Make it happen. This is my other point. People complain that all these fantastic legacy technologies aren't used but nobody puts in the work to modernize and use them. If it was that simple, where are all the companies doing it?

[rdiddly]

Is it companies, that would or should do it? Colleges and other publicly-funded entities are who did it the first time. Companies can only do what's profitable. (Or what they can convince investors will someday be profitable, but we can ignore that aberration in the long term.)

[manigandham]

I didn't mean it that deeply, just that if people who believe these older technologies can drive modern incarnations then I would expect them to have produced products by now.