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Just want to say that Discord and Slack do not solve the exact same problem as IRC. And here lies one of the most difficult aspects of protocols versus programs, protocols are much slower to adapt. Discord allows for a ton of functionalities that are not possible natively through IRC and it is a mistake to dismiss them. On the other hand, discord and slack offer pretty much the same things that we already had with MSN messenger all the way back in 2008. Voice messages, image sharing, custom emotes, group chats, etc, etc. Although design lines have changed; client wise, I'm pretty sure you can make a discord clone that runs pretty similar in 2008 hardware. So it's not like I don't agree with the point you make here. Processing and streaming video is, as you say, costly. And better hardware has helped a lot in this regard. Now a days it's possible to stream videogames. But this power that is now available to everyone is misused by most. Websites are bloated and they are dozens of megabytes on a lot of crap that doesn't really offer any tangible benefit to the end user. A lot of applications are slow and big, I think a lot of this problem comes from the culture fostered in the dev area where it's more important to ship new features than good features. In reality, managers care more about having lots of features shipped than for a developer to take a few days on just one feature so it performs well. Developers capable of doing both fast and good deployments are rare and this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. We should be spending much more time building performant tools that are easy to use, so that the heavy lifting is done where it needs to be. The idea of Electron is great, but the execution of it is bad; this is imo where the work should be done. |
As a stubborn user still today i always cringe a little when I hear that discord is just a better version of IRC.