Ask HN: Why don't more people know about Freenode?

[datafix]

The freenode subreddit on reddit has less than 200 subscribers. Imagine if every programmer knew about freenode. We would have such a rich exchange of ideas, and probably better open source software.

[tony]

For chat, people will use Slack, Discord or Gitter. These new chat apps have clients on Linux/Mac/Windows and mobile apps and log messages remotely out of the box, where as with IRC, it requires additional setups and the solutions can be porous.

The other thing is IRC is one of those things where instant feedback isn't guaranteed. So many /join, ask a question, and /part by the time I even read it. In those cases, there's StackOverflow (and to a lesser extent reddit), where a thread is created and upvotes help a post weigh upwards a bit longer. As icing on the cake, there's nesting / voting in the conversation, as well.

With IRC, messages fade away and its really a matter of timing you find someone with the right expertise that bites. If you ask something at the wrong hour, you have to hope someone reads far enough up to answer you.

On StackOverflow, people are very generous in pointing to a newer answer with less votes. It's easy to copy and paste code snippets. Posts can be edited. StackOverflow posts are also more persistent as there's a concept of duplication and trying to have one thread for a question.

[giancarlostoro]

> With IRC, messages fade away and its really a matter of timing you find someone with the right expertise that bites. If you ask something at the wrong hour, you have to hope someone reads far enough up to answer you.

This is what connection bouncers solve. I think IRC just needs a good client. IRCCloud is a good client and bouncer service, cheap too. I can keep track of IRC convos from forever ago.

The only thing stopping an IRC client from being as resourceful as Slack or similar is the client developers. I've seen clients that preview images like Slack does, long before Slack was a thing. I think the KDE one does this? Or at least Quassel does.

[runjake]

I spend every day on Freenode but it’s important to mention that Freenode is now operated by London Trust Media aka Private Internet Access, a beloved VPN service that was just bought by people with a shady past involving malware. Something to consider here.

[Swant]

I wouldn't say operated by. PIA is the largest sponsor but the network is operated by independent volunteers.

[runjake]

PIA went from a Freenode sponsor to owner a couple years ago.

https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn

[esotericn]

> The freenode subreddit on reddit has less than 200 subscribers.

Er, yeah, because they're on bloody IRC?

Tons of people know about Freenode. I barely ever use chat platforms other than IRC excepting communications with family.

It seems like a meme to me to pretend IRC is dead. It's about as dead as email.

[cahoot_bird]

For better or worse, other platforms such as Slack, Discord, and Gitter have beaten IRC in attracting new programmers.

While IRC is a little more open as a protocol, the reality is it lacks the features these other platforms provide in attracting new visitors. In my observation this might include: Mobile support, being able to see past messages, emoji, embeded video/gif, having a company maintain and add features, and being somewhat less anonymous.

I doubt IRC networks such as freenode will disappear anytime in the near future, but I doubt it will grow much either given the alternatives.

[wlesieutre]

People often bring up that you can set up a persistent relay to give you message history on your mobile device, which is accurate in the same way that you don’t need Dropbox because you can just rsync a folder with your server.

Technically true, but not going to get mass adoption against more convenient alternatives.

[1ark]

Been trying to get back into IRC recently. Because of nostalgia. Like some others said, and I am realizing, it is not a very good place to exchange ideas or even ask about problems. Chat is not good for these things. Forums, mailing list, StackOverflow etc., even Twitter is much better, because everyone have time to craft and edit their messages, and think things through. It is usually archived and searchable. In chat, the message is easily lost or the conversation has carried on to another topic before you are able to respond a long message, like this one.

[Kim_Bruning]

It's really good for troubleshooting though. Once people start helping you it's a very powerful tool. It also helps immensely wrt absorbing the culture around a particular language or system.

Often a group of people will have an IRC channel, a website, multiple blogs, servers, etc. It's one tool in a spectrum of tools.

[wbl]

Or it ends up on bash.org

[gregf]

In my experience asking questions on irc is pretty much useless. A lot of times you just get try hard's they don't even understand what you are trying to do that are determined they know more than you about what you are doing. It's just frustrating. If I got a question I typically just sit on it for a day two, and figure it out or ask on a forum. As far as chat, I much prefer something like rocketchat/slack/mattermost because of the embedded data that comes with it. A friend posts a funny YouTube video I just click play I don't have to load open a browser and navigate to the link. When someone posts a link you get meta data with the link so you can decide if you want to click it or not. It's more streamlined that way IMO. IRC could easily integrate this stuff but development of the standard hasn't really progressed that I have seen.

[boring_twenties]

> A friend posts a funny YouTube video I just click play

Precisely why I prefer IRC.

[SamReidHughes]

IRC is not a great place for a rich exchange of ideas. I did learn a bunch on it -- but I could have done so elsewhere.

[Kim_Bruning]

A lot of people do know about freenode though. It's a very large network. :-)

[nitrix]

Freenode has orders more than 200 users online, yet alone registered users.

I imagine the crowd that tend to use instant messaging don't see the same appeal with threaded message boards. Different medium, for better or worse.

[cjbprime]

Back around 2000, I'd say that most open source programmers did know about Freenode.

It was pretty cool: you'd sometimes have the experience of being frustrated with a software project, guessing their IRC channel name on Freenode, joining with your question and getting an instant answer from the main author of the project.

But there were lots of things that weren't cool, mainly being unable to see messages sent when you weren't online. IRC bouncers existed but most people didn't have shell access to run one on; they were expensive.

[kick]

IRC is frustrating, Freenode prevents anonymity (blocks Tor users unless they auth over clearnet first, as an example), graphical IRC clients are rarely any good, Freenode isn't even the best network (Rizon), Freenode is owned by a sketchy company (London Trust Media/Private Internet Access/the malware distributor that bought PIA a few weeks ago), some more stuff that I'd have to fill the character limit to mention.

[kgwxd]

I used to use it for Clojure(Script) but it seems to have just stopped working. I put in a nick and channel and prove I'm not a bot, but the start button doesn't work, no explanation. I'm sure it would take less time than even typing this up to figure out the cause, but there are other means of access to the Clojure community.

[slenk]

You seem to be accessing it through a website. There are a lot of other tools for connecting to IRC - don't be afraid to try out Hexchat or some others.

[colund]

I my experience Freenode has lots of aholes like the admins in ##java who just want to insult people who join, asking them to Google everything, Tia's (try it yourself) and ban people who try to help since it ruins their feeling of power. Very toxic, so I would recommend everyone to stay away.

[rs23296008n1]

I wouldnt recommend staying away. That implies the whole thing has no value. I've used it and found it ok for what it is. The tumbleweed effect of no-one around hits me due to timezones. That is a bigger negative to me.

My experience with freenode was similar to other forums. But I'd never be surprised by an online forum containing aholes. It almost necessary as part of a diverse ecosystem. How the forum deals with the bad is the real measure. That's hard when the admin is the part of that bad.

I prefer Discord for actual online group tasks because just about everything is better for our group's usecases, especially voice chat, bots, history, images, video etc. Being text only, IRC is less useful now in comparison.

[perceptronas]

Reddit is a bad measure. Many people don't browse it. Most of the content/users are from one political side making it an echo chamber and a place to avoid.

[peruvian]

A lot of programmers don’t want to be on IRC and prefer Slack or Discord. Simple as that.

[geofft]

I actively use Freenode (nominally for open source development, but in practice for keeping in touch with my friends), as well as other IRC networks.

I don't think it's a good platform for a rich exchange of ideas or for developing software for the following reasons:

- Messages are one line long. I couldn't write something like this comment. Much like Twitter, it's good for casual conversation with lots of people reading and participating in realtime, but it's bad for in-depth discussions, and you get the phenomenon where either complicated ideas are needlessly split into multiple messages, or they're just not said at all because simple ideas (which aren't necessarily correlated with better ideas) drown them out.

- As a result, it's hard to use it as a platform to design software. You can talk about things, but you really want to switch to a place where you can write multiple paragraphs for design. Even git commit messages accommodate multiple paragraphs. Mailing lists are well-suited to this.

- Also, you can't post things like crash logs, screenshots, diagrams, etc. without using a third-party service.

- There's no central public log. Yes, third-party IRC loggers exist, but Freenode as a platform doesn't offer one. If you want to exchange ideas, it's important that they be recorded for at least some amount of posterity.

- Relatedly, there's no way to read the history of a conversation if you're not online at the moment. Again, yes, third-party IRC loggers exist, as do bouncers, screen sessions, etc., but there's nothing built into the platform.

- There's no threading or topic separation of any sort. Even bulletin boards of the early '00s let you subscribe to an entire bulletin board and have multiple simultaneous discussion topics. The only way to do that on IRC is to have multiple channels, and there's no way to keep subscribers in sync across channels, so people tend not to create channels very often. Other topic separation tools: separate threads on a mailing list, separate bugs on a bug tracker, separate posts to Reddit or HN or Discourse, even Slack threads as mediocre as they are, even separate areas of the page on an unstructured wiki (think https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreadMode, or talk pages on Wikipedia).

- As a result, it scales poorly to large numbers of users. I was in #rust on Mozilla IRC for a while when the language was young, helping people out; as the room got busier, it became harder to have a conversation more than a few messages long because something else would come up (and again, each message had to be short, so it was hard to discuss anything of complexity).

I can't imagine any way to have every programmer on it (the way that every programmer could, theoretically, be on StackOverflow - and much less theoretically, I'd expect almost every programmer reads StackOverflow) and have it possible to get any value out of it.

Also, this is the first time I've heard of the Freenode subreddit. Why would I join it? What's the point of a communication platform about a communication platform? I'm also not in an IRC channel about Twitter, nor do I follow a hashtag about GitHub.

[BrandoElFollito]

Your point about the length his true on other platforms as well.

I was recently automatically warned by a bot when I asked a question on a discord channel. The question was detailed, with some code and about 20 lines long. I got slapped because it is "spam" (and apparently hard to read on a mobile which is not true after checking on my phone) . Others channels are fine with that.

[ta999999171]

Matrix.org chats are growing.