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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

I find both IRC and bittorrent to have a superb UX. It's minimal, highly interoperable and programmatically accessible. I've had sketchy experiences getting a connection between two specific peers though. I presumed it was NAT traversal being finnicky.

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> I've had sketchy experiences getting a connection between two specific peers though. I presumed it was NAT traversal being finnicky.

And that is probably are IPv4's flaws, not BitTorrent. If everyone switched to IPv6 then they can connect to each other without using NAT, because IPv6 address space is so big everybody on earth can have their own unique IP address.

People would still have to open a hole in their firewall, and then we’re back to people implementing UPnP

At least on IPv6 people know it's caused by their firewall, which they can fix on their own.

On IPv4 you don't know if your packets got dropped because of your firewall blocking some ports, or because ISP's CGNAT get overloaded and decide to drop your packets (and customers can't do anything to fix that)

> I find both IRC and bittorrent to have a superb UX. It's minimal, highly interoperable and programmatically accessible.

I agree, but there's no way my mom could figure out IRC on her own. She uses Dropbox daily, though.

Before the WWW ordinary people did figure out IRC. It's just that people have got used to a different kind of UX - arguably what we have now is more complicated and harder to understand.

Yeah when I was in middle school in the late 90's all the normal girls hung out on IRC using mIRC. What killed IRC was more mobile I think, since once you need to set up a bouncer and stuff it actually gets difficult.

Anyone who can use a web browser can use IRC.

E.g.

https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/irc.libera.chat:+6697#irc

https://web.libera.chat/?channels=#irc

There are also mobile apps with better persistence and even simpler interfaces.

IRC will never take over the world because:

* The protocol is missing some minor but important UX-enhancing features. This is fixable, but there's nothing valuable enough about the existing userbase for a capitalized entity to bother working with the entrenched groups. And non-capitalized entities move relatively slowly.

* There is no profit in it -- the corps who want to own messaging want to own messaging. This is a great idea for them, but a terrible idea for users.

* IRC networks don't want Eternal September to happen to them. Not that anyone is beating down their door.

> IRC networks don't want Eternal September to happen to them. Not that anyone is beating down their door.

Too late for that. In late 90's/early 00's, you had web clients for IRC.

IRC is missing many features that people expect these days though, whereas I don't think Bittorrent is. Bittorrent has definitely done a better job at evolving than IRC has too. E.g. with the DHT, magnet links, webtorrent, etc.

IRC doesn't even support basic text formatting, let alone links, images, emojis, threads, etc.

You're far from wrong, but I would quibble with a couple of points. Specifically, IRC does support basic text formatting; I've written a client library [1] to implement it. It's not very comprehensive or at all well specified, though. Some clients can handle emoji, links, and images, but it is client-dependent.

[1] https://github.com/aaron-em/rcirc-styles.el

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