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Comment by welterde | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean with keeping caps in your head for my client? Capabilities? Why would you need to keep those in mind?

One doesn't need to keep anything in mind if one just has two different clients for the two user groups. And there are IRC clients, such as thelounge or irccloud (ok.. more than just a client), that offer things like inline images/audio, link preview, etc. (and wouldn't be hard to add missing things there). On the protocol level they just send urls in the irc messages, which falls back nicely for the other user group. I send images, pastes, etc. all the time on IRC it's just I don't want my client to render any of them inline - I want to decide if I look at something or not, while you want a client that does render everything inline for the most part.

PS: My spam filter judges html emails rather harshly :P

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> What do you mean with keeping caps in your head for my client? Capabilities? Why would you need to keep those in mind?

Because the point of a conversation is to communicate. Your client is changing the meaning of what I am sending to you, and I have to know that to effectively communicate with you. I value clarity, and IRC doesn't offer me this without knowing what the other client is doing. I do not trust a normal, representative user to click on every relevant link and internalize it from there, because my experience is that people don't. On the other hand, being able to post a snippet makes it part of the conversation and not a reference, and in my experience means people are more likely to actually read the thing. The assumption that I should just throw URLs at you and you will parse them, either through a computer or mentally, and do the right thing with them increases the lossiness of communication, and adds to my mental stack. My mental stack is tall enough already for me.

In my experience from platform to platform it's a difference of kind, and frankly? It's also not one I really want to be dealing with myself on the sending end more generally. I don't like the bouncer paradigm and I'm not paying irccloud to host one for me when I can do so myself but doing so myself is annoying and work that other platforms do not demand of me. And I'm not going to a pastebin website when I can literally drag a code file in and click "post as snippet". It's slower and it's unpleasant. A sufficiently smart client could solve these things, sure--but Slack and Discord already do them, and the 99% case are there and not on IRC.

I am not, to be totally clear, saying you're wrong to like what you like. I've run IRC servers many times and I used them steadily for about fifteen years. But I have learned, personally and for me, that the things users seem to value on IRC makes those folks harder for me to communicate with as we've normed (for lack of a better term) rich experiences in group conversations. And if you're cool with that, that's totally fine. It's a tradeoff, not a moral thing. It does also means that (not that you're doing it, but some IRC defenders in this thread have definitely logged on) incredulity that Nobody Wants To Use IRC just isn't reasonable. It's not a friendly platform unless your values are its values. Mine aren't anymore, so I don't use it.

I don't think the argument that the mere existence of clients that work differently ruin the modern features somehow is really that fair (see below). The bouncer argument is kinda fair, but if you also don't like to live in a walled gardens (slack or discord), it limits the options a lot (although there are IRC servers that have integrated bouncers! Matrix is kinda like running your own bouncer again, unless you are ok with a third-party running it for you). I can also accept that there are many more non-modern IRC clients than modern ones that work the way you would expect, so the overall expectation would be biased. And that probably it was too little too late.

But I think you are overthinking it by a lot. If you were to use IRC, you should just use a modern "magical" IRC clients and not worry about what happens in the background (and btw it's not just "could" but "does".. there are clients that do all that already - where you can just drag and drop stuff in and it will magically do the right thing). And I am willing to bet that in other instances you already do operate that way. Unless your mail client is very broken it will send a plain text version of your email along with the html email. Do you worry there too that I am actually just looking at the plain text version of your email and not with the intended html formatting? Or do you worry that the person you are talking to on slack might just be connected via matterircd via IRC (or directly via IRC back before slack did the bait 'n switch) and not see any of your snippets, images, etc.? Which btw. I am totally doing despite how much it butchers everything - I just cannot stand that UI (and neither can my rather old laptop).

> I don't think the argument that the mere existence of clients that work differently ruin the modern features somehow is really that fair (see below).

It totally does, though. If I write an emoji thumbsup, and the recipient only sees a tofu box, they won't know if I'm agreeing, disagreeing, or saying something else.

If I'm participating in a heterogeneous environment, I need to refrain from including any mission-critical information in a form that can't be read by all of the participants. And since writing the same information twice is usually too much work, the extended functionality winds up completely unused, or at least only gets used for low-value spam.

> Or do you worry that the person you are talking to on slack might just be connected via matterircd via IRC

Yes, I do worry about that. If I find out that one of my coworkers is using a Slack client that doesn't implement all the functionality in the reference client, and can't just talk them out of it, then I'll have to make sure not to use anything that they can't see.

I might even start doing an IRC bridge myself, in fact, since at that point there's really no actual purpose in running a chat client with a bunch of functionality that I cannot use.

A major part of Slack's value is that this is very rare. Almost everyone just uses the reference implementation.

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