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Comment by bpicolo | Hacker News Reader

They had a really well defined user-space, marketed at it well, and really nailed the user experience, while still being free for the typical user. There is a lot to love about Discord.

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I use Discord everyday BUT I seriously prefer IRC with weechat and glowing-bear.org.

I feel like everything down with Discord could be done with IRC in a open source way. IRC for the 21st Century?

Matrix is taking care of this problem in a big way. Check out https://riot.im/app

I don't have anything particularly negative to say about the competition, but if you're looking for a completely free and open infrastructure to build on, I don't think anything (besides IRC, but IRC has it's own problems) comes close to Matrix at the moment. I'm very impressed with the project so far. That said, with a reference server implementation in Python, and few native desktop applications available, there is plenty of work to do.

Edit: Matrix already works great as an IRC bouncer for networks which have been bridged.

IRC is a pretty not-extensible platform. It's just not in the spec to have larger messages, metadata. Then you get into things like push notifications, image hosting, video hosting, file hosting...

IRC for the 21st century IS these apps like slack, discord, etc.

IRC is for people who participate in the internet. For them it isn't hard to host their own website or just use any of the innumberable image/video/whatever hosts and paste a link. Discord is for tech ignorant people who consume things pushed to them by companies over the internet.

Bundling up everything into a centralized, proprietary package will go bad for the consumers eventually. But for now they'll trade away their freedom for convenience and enjoy it.

I don't see the justification for speaking poorly of their users. Is convenience a bad thing now? Why do I want other image hosts hosting my images instead? What's the difference between putting them there and a chat platform from a privacy or centralization standpoint? I know for a fact many people use slack to trade images they don't want on the public net. So then I need to host a private image host too? That's a bit silly.

IRC is a fine platform. That doesn't mean it's what everybody needs/wants.

"DAE think normies are dipshits and sub-human animals - but internet turbonerds are the best??????"

"wait, why are you walking away from me, i'm talki-"

Everything Discord does (and more) used to be doable in pIRCh way back in the later 90s, including video chat over IRC.

Discord's design feels a lot like Slack. I wonder where the overlap is between the two products.

Discord is great at being both a Slack clone AND a Teamspeak clone at the same time.

The real question is which one does IRC better.

Neither. Both have too much white (or black) space, creating horrible information density.

Discord has a compact layout option. It's good enough for me--the pixels wasted here and there improve readability while not losing too much text IMHO.

Then again, using a monospace font like I did for years (ssh+screen+irssi) wastes a lot of screen area just because every character is so wide.

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