[Stampo00]

I think we need to separate IRC the client from IRC the protocol. Everything you just described is possible with a sufficiently advanced client without any changes to the protocol. In fact, some clients already do what you describe.

[eropple]

"A client could do that" is true. It's also unhelpful. They don't all, or even most, do that. Consistency is valuable, and trying to coach people to switch IRC clients (assuming one exists that ticks the right boxes on their platform) is, to me, a pretty poor use of my limited time on this planet.

I don't love Discord or Slack and there are a lot of things I miss about IRC, but the amount of sandpaper around getting people who are less than extremely forgiving of Computer Stuff to use it adroitly is one. Two chat platforms is already one too many for me, and IRC doesn't really make the cut for a third anymore because I too am becoming less forgiving of Computer Stuff as I get older, too.

[jjav]

> "A client could do that" is true. It's also unhelpful.

That's a fundamental disagreement. I know some people like tightly walled gardens where there can only be one client and you're stuck with its limitations. Personally, I despise those systems and will do everything to avoid them.

> Consistency is valuable

Consistency is not valuable in this context, it is a straightjacket. I want a client which works exactly the way I want, which is likely different from what you want. So we need probably different clients, or at least an extremely configurable one.

This is why email is so wonderful and I use it above all else. I can have my client which I love and others can have their clients which they love and I find unusable but we can all be happy.

[eropple]

I completely agree--it absolutely is a fundamental disagreement! It's also why "but why won't people use IRC?" is misguided. I won't use IRC because I don't value what it does anymore. I valued it a lot more when almost everyone I talked to was as much of a computer nerd as I am--that's no longer the case and the computer-nerdy parts of my life are complementary pieces rather than core ones now, so I want different things.

The idea that IRC might be better was why I clicked on this thread in the first place, before I really parsed the srht part of it, 'cause my values absolutely do not overlap with theirs. (Which is fine. Like what you like!)

[welterde]

Part of the problem is though that there people (like myself) that simply don't want any of those features. If everyone agreed that these features are worth having then there would be no problem, since then every client would get them eventually.

People have different needs and expectations, so why shouldn't different clients for different people exist?

[eropple]

TBH? Because the expectation for a communications platform is that you want people to communicate with you, and imposing the need to keep a set of caps in my head for your client is grating and annoying. "I only accept text-based email" would be the closest equivalent I can think of, and I don't think I'd go out of my way to write a text-based email to you because you choose not to parse `<ul>`.

I'm not saying somebody who only accepts text-based email is wrong, mind--do as thou wilt and all. I am saying that the more barriers you present to being communicated with, the less reasonable it is to expect people to communicate with you. IRC makes it too difficult to communicate in modes I've come to expect as normal, so I'm just not gonna do that these days.

[welterde]

What do you mean with keeping caps in your head for my client? Capabilities? Why would you need to keep those in mind?

One doesn't need to keep anything in mind if one just has two different clients for the two user groups. And there are IRC clients, such as thelounge or irccloud (ok.. more than just a client), that offer things like inline images/audio, link preview, etc. (and wouldn't be hard to add missing things there). On the protocol level they just send urls in the irc messages, which falls back nicely for the other user group. I send images, pastes, etc. all the time on IRC it's just I don't want my client to render any of them inline - I want to decide if I look at something or not, while you want a client that does render everything inline for the most part.

PS: My spam filter judges html emails rather harshly :P

[eropple]

> What do you mean with keeping caps in your head for my client? Capabilities? Why would you need to keep those in mind?

Because the point of a conversation is to communicate. Your client is changing the meaning of what I am sending to you, and I have to know that to effectively communicate with you. I value clarity, and IRC doesn't offer me this without knowing what the other client is doing. I do not trust a normal, representative user to click on every relevant link and internalize it from there, because my experience is that people don't. On the other hand, being able to post a snippet makes it part of the conversation and not a reference, and in my experience means people are more likely to actually read the thing. The assumption that I should just throw URLs at you and you will parse them, either through a computer or mentally, and do the right thing with them increases the lossiness of communication, and adds to my mental stack. My mental stack is tall enough already for me.

In my experience from platform to platform it's a difference of kind, and frankly? It's also not one I really want to be dealing with myself on the sending end more generally. I don't like the bouncer paradigm and I'm not paying irccloud to host one for me when I can do so myself but doing so myself is annoying and work that other platforms do not demand of me. And I'm not going to a pastebin website when I can literally drag a code file in and click "post as snippet". It's slower and it's unpleasant. A sufficiently smart client could solve these things, sure--but Slack and Discord already do them, and the 99% case are there and not on IRC.

I am not, to be totally clear, saying you're wrong to like what you like. I've run IRC servers many times and I used them steadily for about fifteen years. But I have learned, personally and for me, that the things users seem to value on IRC makes those folks harder for me to communicate with as we've normed (for lack of a better term) rich experiences in group conversations. And if you're cool with that, that's totally fine. It's a tradeoff, not a moral thing. It does also means that (not that you're doing it, but some IRC defenders in this thread have definitely logged on) incredulity that Nobody Wants To Use IRC just isn't reasonable. It's not a friendly platform unless your values are its values. Mine aren't anymore, so I don't use it.

[welterde]

I don't think the argument that the mere existence of clients that work differently ruin the modern features somehow is really that fair (see below). The bouncer argument is kinda fair, but if you also don't like to live in a walled gardens (slack or discord), it limits the options a lot (although there are IRC servers that have integrated bouncers! Matrix is kinda like running your own bouncer again, unless you are ok with a third-party running it for you). I can also accept that there are many more non-modern IRC clients than modern ones that work the way you would expect, so the overall expectation would be biased. And that probably it was too little too late.

But I think you are overthinking it by a lot. If you were to use IRC, you should just use a modern "magical" IRC clients and not worry about what happens in the background (and btw it's not just "could" but "does".. there are clients that do all that already - where you can just drag and drop stuff in and it will magically do the right thing). And I am willing to bet that in other instances you already do operate that way. Unless your mail client is very broken it will send a plain text version of your email along with the html email. Do you worry there too that I am actually just looking at the plain text version of your email and not with the intended html formatting? Or do you worry that the person you are talking to on slack might just be connected via matterircd via IRC (or directly via IRC back before slack did the bait 'n switch) and not see any of your snippets, images, etc.? Which btw. I am totally doing despite how much it butchers everything - I just cannot stand that UI (and neither can my rather old laptop).

[Gigachad]

This is even worse because you have no idea what other clients support. The best part of modern IM is that you know what you see is pretty much what they see. Tiny differences in presentation make a huge difference on the message.