Flutterby™! : I realize that a certain sort of person

I realize that a certain sort of person

2021-02-17 20:30:06.856207+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

I realize that a certain sort of person likes "the shiny", but why did we end up with Slack, the buggy abomination of UI fail, over IRC? How did we let that happen? (Probably the same people who think Clubhouse is a good idea...)

[ related topics: User Interface ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: I realize that a certain sort of person made: 2021-02-22 09:11:12.468253+00 by: spc476

It's hard to send cat pictures via IRC.

#Comment Re: I realize that a certain sort of person made: 2021-02-22 11:28:05.956291+00 by: TheSHAD0W

If you think that's bad, try Discord.

#Comment Re: I realize that a certain sort of person made: 2021-02-22 18:16:41.216722+00 by: brennen [edit history]

I've now fled two jobs in a row where it was mandatory, only to see Slack fusing itself with the structure of a third, like some kind of creeping parasitic growth.

I've been on IRC almost continuously since 1996, I use it constantly at work, I still like it, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about chat systems. I don't think I really have a unified theory of this, but I guess I now suspect that the success of something I'd hate in the ways that I hate Slack was overdetermined:

IRC didn't used to seem hard, in the scheme of things, but now it does for almost all users. The available clients got more nerd-centric, stuff spackled onto the server side to enable things like ownership of nicks and channels got more complicated, the web and smartphones slowly obliterated the whole notion of protocols and clients in the mind of the overwhelming majority of end users.
IRC has a handful of real problems: No good encryption story, flaky network connections under the conditions a lot of clients are working with, a lousy experience on mobile devices (unless maybe you know how to rig up some intermediary service), you miss history and context if you're not logged in.
So what about the protocol-level alternatives? Well, XMPP is still around, but seems like it mostly functioned in practice as an embrace-extend-extinguish opening for Google, and along the way it probably ate a lot of the energy that might have produced an evolution of IRC. Matrix theoretically has a good encryption story and a notion of not being centralized, but in practice my experience of it has been fairly terrible, and I suspect it also functioned mostly to soak up energy that should have gone into something way easier to implement and host.
A lot of people who might have solved these problems have been content enough to hang out on IRC that they weren't motivated to work on the problem, and now it's far too late (this is a parallel to the "PGP/GPG are why we don't have encryption" and "GMail is why we don't have good desktop mail clients" theory of things).
Administering servers takes experts and never stops being work at some level; giving somebody your credit card number and getting a namespace in their silo is easy.
People like reaction GIFs and emojis.
Slack feels like IRC designed for the centralized office panopticon because that's what it is. Broadly speaking, your boss wants the option to read your messages, and physically dispersing the culture of modern employment has required a place to look busy in order to be perceived as doing work.
Slack was smart about the EEE play by supporting an IRC gateway for long enough to disarm / draw in a bunch of IRC diehards who might have put up some resistance until their market dominance made it unnecessary to pretend.
Slack was built by people with long experience building a silo that a particular subset of the internet cool kids would think was cool. See also: Flickr.
There's an idea that Slack is a good replacement for e-mail. It doesn't really matter if it actually makes the pathological things about mail worse, it just matters that people believe it makes them better.
There's an idea that, because history is preserved, Slack is a good repository of institutional memory. Again, it doesn't matter if this is actually a good idea, only that people think it is.

Anyway, it plausibly could have been different, but here we are, and everything sucks.

#Comment Re: I realize that a certain sort of person made: 2021-02-23 18:29:35.284122+00 by: Dan Lyke

Shadow, I am totally with you on Discord. I used it to try to chat with a millenial recently, and I have never felt so old.

The point about cat pictures is a good one. I think a lot of what it gives is cat pictures and emoticons.

And I realized that I've gotten out of the habit of hanging out on Brennen's IRC server, so I reconnected there...

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