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Comment by liendolucas | Hacker News Reader

I still don't get why so many channels that should probably be on IRC moved to Discord. Yesterday I tried to share the output of an strace and apparently I have to pay to emit more than 2000 characters. Login to Discord is something that shocks me: every single time I'm told that I'm logging in from a new computer (wrong). Confim I'm human. Then need to check my email. Confirm. And relogin. This at least to me happens every single time. Reported to Discord obviously in vain. Never experienced such a login disaster in my life.

What is wrong with IRC and mailing lists that everyone jumped to Discord? Since I have started to use Discord couldn't find a single good thing about it.

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>What is wrong with IRC and mailing lists that everyone jumped to Discord?

You're looking at it from the perspective of a chat Participant instead of an Owner/Administrator.

For the owners+admins, the other alternatives of IRC, email mailing lists, forum software like vBulletin, phpBB, etc require extra work of provisioning a server and maintaining it.

From the perspective of the chat topic owner, Discord is the simpler than any of the above. Just click "Add A Server (+)" and start sending out invites in seconds. (https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/204849977-How-...)

In other words, the tradeoff is it's more hassle for some participants (like you) but it's less hassle for the topic administrator.

Another feature that's important to some Administrators that's not easily available on a self-hosted IRC server is blocking bots or lower-quality participants via Discord's "Verification Level": https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/216679607-Veri...

Turning that knob will also annoy some potential participants.

EDIT ADD a link to help illustrate the reply about "RBAC" implemented in Discord: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/214836687-Disc...

Discord also has implemented an RBAC system that makes permissioning simple.

Yes, but if that's going to alienate me, I'm not going to join that Discord server.

Note: I just deleted Discord from my computer.

>, but if that's going to alienate me, I'm not going to join that Discord server.

Of course! Your preference is understandable but it just means the owner/admin can't make everybody happy. Your rejection of Discord because the admin chose it must be weighed against the following factors:

(1) you also can't join an IRC chat that doesn't exist because the owner/admin has no interest in the extra work of setting up an IRC node. E.g. the open source code project maintainer has no interest (or wants to spend money) on provisioning a server to run IRC software. The money problem & hosting provisioning problem is solved by the owner/admin just using Discord.

(2) there are other users that prefer Discord because they already have the login for other purposes (gaming, art, etc). Millions of users already have the Discord app on their phone. No need for users to hunt down an IRC client. The owner/admin doesn't want to alienate them.

So to make users like ivanmontillam more happy, it requires making the owner/admin and the other users less happy because they don't want to use IRC. That's the tradeoff.

This feels like a generational thing, tbqh.

One of the reasons people trumpet for moving to Discord is "it keeps the message history!!!!!!!" which would be nice if 1) Discord's search wasn't a wet bag of cat ass, 2) if anybody _bothered_ to search for their question first (tale as old as time / song as old as rhyme / RTFM n00b), and 3) their platform wasn't moderated by and largely used of groomers.

It's not like you can't log IRC channel chat and make it available for search and BONUS, assuming Google doesn't replace everything with AI, it's easily discoverable through Google or other search engines once they get crawled.

IRC is terrible the same way it was terrible when I used it 30 years ago.

It's Y2K brah if you can't paste an image into chat, your chat is garbage.

Chat is more than text, unless you go to meet your friend for coffee and you chat by typing out words on a typewriter and handing sheets of paper back and forth between each other.

And that's like one of the ten thousand problems with IRC.

"But it's lightweig..." so few people care about how lightweight it is that the statement "nobody cares how lightweight it is" is only off the mark by a millimeter or two.

Two more problems are: the ratio of dickheads-to-humans and security flaws so bad that any organization releasing a spec that bad today would be pilloried as either incompetent or actually literally malicious every day, by everyone, all of the time, on hacker news.

ps: the limit for IRC is 512 characters. If you try to paste an strace into an IRC chat if your client and server are good it will be broken up into multiple messages, if they are bad the message will be discarded, and regardless of if your message makes it from your client to everyone else, you will probably be autobanned for flooding.

Just use Jabber. IRC is not IM. Enuff said. Discord it's a cancer.

> every single time I'm told that I'm logging in from a new computer (wrong)

You're probably doing a lot of things to protect your privacy, things which prevent Discord from recognizing you're logging in from the same machine. Logging in from a browser? Wiping all the cookies and storage every time? Surprised it doesn't recognize you?

> What is wrong with IRC and mailing lists that everyone jumped to...

Why did forums emerge ... like HN or Reddit.

Lots of technologies/platforms accomplish the same end goal. It's more about where have people gathered (network effects) and valuable information shared.

(Not many people are on IRC these days, and as a result - less valuable information can be found there)

I do regret the jump from desktop computing to mobile, but mIRC for example didn't jump while Discord, Meta, and the other advertiser-pleasers went in mobile-first.

mIRC for instance: Linux - use Wine

MacOS - run mIRC inside a Windows emulator, with no plans to change that, although it is compatible with other Mac-ready IRC clients that you can use to talk to the same people

Similar situation for Android and iOS compatibility

Source: https://www.mirc.com/mac.html

Wine? on Linux? Seriously, any IRC chat client on that OS would stomp MIRC any day.

> What is wrong with IRC

The UX sucks (even if there are a thousand UX's and some of them don't suck, they get drowned out by the sucky ones) and the friction is too high to get started.

> and mailing lists that everyone jumped to Discord?

They did UX right and lowered the friction. I doubt Discord actually poached users from IRC, they just made chatting great again.

2000 characters seems like it should be on a pastebin, not pasted into an IRC channel. I've shared pastebin links in a discord channel, one shared with matrix. For reference, that content length is three times the OP comment.

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