[globular-toast]

> I have a bad feeling about this. Discord essentially does one thing really well. I don't want to see it go down the way of so many chat platforms trying to be everything and becoming a bloated mess.

IRC does one thing and does it well. Discord is the bloated mess.

[jeltz]

No, IRC does one thing and does it poorly. I love IRC for the great communities it has spawned but there are many issues with IRC including how you must have an IRC bouncer.

[globular-toast]

It's always worked for me. I've never used a bouncer. Maybe the "one thing" is not what you think it is. Think of it like a real room. When you're in the room you hear what's going on. When you're not, you don't.

[KptMarchewa]

Turns out most people don't like that idea, and appreciate chat history.

[oriki]

> IRC does one thing and does it well.

Unfortunately, the one thing that it does well (chat, and nothing else) is supported by a dozen things that it does terribly, and support for them has been hacked on top of the chat features in most places.

Bouncers, persistency, rich media (youtube/twitter/image embeds come to mind), mobile accessibility, presence, the ease of channel ownership... these are all things that IRC lacks. Users don't want to switch from their chat app to their imaging sharing app to send a friend a picture inline. IRC works great where people are willing to put in the work to make it great for themselves individually, but the people Discord appeals to aren't really like that.

[globular-toast]

If Discord just solved some of IRCs problems I'd be with it. But it's such a regression. I don't want to run another browser process just for chat. I don't want to see people's pictures (on IRC, everyone is equal). I don't want embedded videos or childish stickers or anything else.

[thiht]

Are you kidding? IRC doesn’t let you update or remove your messages, doesn’t have a permanent history, doesn’t even properly handle accounts and chan owners, doesn’t support any kind of rich text by itself, has netsplits, … what does it do well exactly? The protocol is simple and I had fun speaking on IRC through telnet when I was younger but that’s about the only good thing I have to say about it

[globular-toast]

You mentioned many things. IRC does one thing. I don't want any of that stuff. Netsplits aren't a huge problem. I'd rather have that than a centralised system that does down all at once.