Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshspankit | Hacker News Reader

Slack exploded on the scene with a refresh of IRC.

USENET could come back with a proper refresh.

> proper refresh.

If it gets a "refresh" the way slack murdered IRC for work, I hope it never does. While were at it, slack can go straight into a volcano. Any value it adds over IRC is A. marginal and B. not work-relevant (because you can't upload anything containing sensitive data there, bearing in mind what it is...).

Usenet is more similar to a group mailing list, so hopefully they aren't talking about "refreshing" it to be like Slack.

How would work related IRC work in practice? Everyone running their own bots so you dont miss messages? You also need a bot for push notifications, as well as one for mirroring. Also a custom solution for file sharing. I know its part of the fun.

However it does not sound suitable for a work environment.

We used to have a centralised bouncer that both fixed push notifications as well as transparent history and presence (i.e. automatic away). File sharing has been part of literally every client for so long I don't know what you want me to say about that. It works, it's p2p. What more is there?

$oldjob had that too, and it worked really well for most people - tech and business alike. I like IRC because it makes you focus on what really matters instead of some sort of seamless Giphy or Wikipedia "rich"-content integration. It's sufficiently async to not bother me at all times, and I can interact with it programmatically very, very easily.

Also, due to its rigidly ephemeral nature (ultimately depending on your personal preference of course, but the default for most clients these days - and opposed to something like Teams, which seems to store everything forever), it nudges its users to use a more suitable, more permanent medium to capture information that is to be persisted. It's clearly a different kind of animal than a wiki or an email archive/mailing list, whereas new "alternatives to email"-tools like Slack, Teams and their ilk are anything and everything in-between, which causes "now where the hell did I read that thing about that other thing..."-syndrome for me.

https://www.irccloud.com/pricing see "Teams"

Well, when someone does not respond on IRC, send them an email.

Still nothing?

SMS?

At this point, maybe they are not responding for damn good reasons?

I check my work email once every 4 days on a good week, and my personal email nearly once every 2 months. Email isn't really a good channel for urgently getting in touch for some people.

True. And when discussing generalities, it is a given people with specifics will stand out. I have mine, you have yours.

Personally, I deal with others on whatever terms they tend to present to me.

So, if someone does not respond quickly, fine. Or they want SMS, or whatever, that is fine too.

I figure they have reasons, seek low friction amd give consideration I am given.

The only value of Slack is receiving messages independent of presence (no need for a bot to keep you online), providing server-backed message history, and providing a UI that allows modern creature comforts like emoji and native images. If those are baked into an IRC client/server combo that achieves broad adoption, we might well see IRC come back as a "poor man's Slack".

No need for chat history bots if you front-end your IRCD with a web interface that has chat history, persistence. [1][2]

[1] - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

[2] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos

I hate Slack. Unlike IRC, it is too much. And it is thick.

Many do not though, your point is good.

I love email because I rarely have to think about it. Thought is action. Same with IRC.

Like, to be fair: Many people don’t know how lean and thin IRC is, they are just happy that they get flexible channels for group communication.

But those who know, know.

I also feel like I dug in to the original code for Slack and it literally was an IRC client.

Totally.

Wouldn't USENET be Reddit?

Various subreddits, async communication, sharing of stuff. User accounts. Only major difference (and it is a big one) is voting.

I must admit I never realized Slack is IRC. It makes perfect sense.

In my opinion there is no need for voting on usenet. You can reply to anyone or ignore anyone. No global echo chambers, no global moderation beyond removing illegal content on a specific provider or filtering a usenet group on a specific provider. If you had a group of like-minded friends that wanted to ignore specific ways of thinking, then you could all contribute to your own group specific ignore-list. Corporations have no financial incentive to build around usenet for this reason, as they have zero control over the client.

The biggest issue with Usenet was spam. NNTP is an open protocol. It is supported in quite a few email clients. Have you tried Pan?

If the Usenet refresh is anything like slack I certainly won't use it.

Aren't Slack's threaded conversations basically a new take on usenet? It's not distributed, and silo'ed of course.. but it's the same idea if you squint.

Same sort of flow, sort of. Not distributed and siloed are very big differences.

> It's not distributed, and silo'ed of course..

But that's the key.

Can I write my own slack client to automate everything just the way I want to, relying only on standard APIs that cannot go away?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com