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by jrm4 687 days ago
So, I was a decently heavy IRC user back in its heyday. Today, "the kids" are all about Discord -- and I do mean the geek coding creative kids most like me but younger and I absolutely see why.

I think I do lament the abscence of a more aggressive "why not just update IRC to be like Discord?"

WAY easier said than done, and I think Matrix is trying, but I suppose the most frustrating thing is trying to tell the young'ns, hey this has a strong chance of enshittifying
1 comments
Joker_vD 686 days ago
> "why not just update IRC to be like Discord?"

Because one is a protocol and another is a platform. To quote from [0]:

    After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face.

    This isn’t a funding issue. If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time. That is a problem for technology, because the rest of the ecosystem is moving very quickly, and if you don’t keep up you will fail. There are entire parallel industries focused on defining and improving methodologies like Agile to try to figure out how to organize enormous groups of people so that they can *move as quickly as possible* because it is so critical.

    When the technology itself is more conducive to stasis than movement, that’s a problem. A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly.
[0] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
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