Discord vs. IRC Rough Notes

by todsacerdoti • 2 years ago

48 48 2 years ago

Overall a very fair post. A few notes:

mobile client sends a notification by default for any activity

This is a setting on a per-server basis, “Default Notification Settings” although it doesn’t effect “Highlight notifications” or poll notifications if the user has participated in a poll, so it leaves something to be desired.

no active ruby bot library

I’ve used Discord.rb, and it may not meet the author’s definition of active, but it does exist.

complicated subscription structure with unclear pricing (but probably <$20/m)

Discord is free. “Boosting” or paying at a server level is completely voluntary and unlocks mostly cosmetic features.

mobile app is noticeably slower at everything

This one I don’t get. On my 5-year-old iPhone the Discord mobile app is pretty snappy. “slower” than what?

mbilker• 2 years ago

I agree with all of your points here. I also noticed that the iOS notifications got an "upgrade" recently with photo previews and user avatar icons now being present in the notifications.

On the note of mobile, I do know plenty of people I talk to on Discord with Android devices dislike the native Android to React Native update which slowed down Discord to the point where people risk bans by modding the older native Android client to continue working with modern Android.

comradesmith• 2 years ago

I also used discord.rb, maybe it’s “not active” cause it’s not broken ;)

KTibow3• 2 years ago

You're running the latest version of the app too, right?

tredre32• 2 years ago

The Discord app is very sluggish on lower end devices. By comparison, all IRC clients I've used were very snappy.

pushcx2• 2 years ago

The notes mention "boosting" because of the interest in Discord's 1080p streaming.

As for slower, I was comparing to than the web app and mostly concerned by how slow it is to change channels and servers, coming from the context of a TUI IRC client where changing is <20ms.

haunter• 2 years ago

Funny that voice chat doesn’t even mentioned yet that’s what made Discord popular. All the other alternatives for group voice for gaming back then needed (still does) a dedicated server. Mumble, TeamSpeak, Ventrilo etc. Discord “bundled” the whole experience into one and that’s why it became a fortnight victory.

floren2• 2 years ago

I think it's just that from the author's point of view, for his specific use-case, voice chat isn't a compelling feature in Discord.

abdullahkhalids2• 2 years ago

He specifically lists one of the good features of Discord as

desktop streaming (1080p)
I want to resume streaming Lobsters coding + office hours (esp for queries)

If you are sharing your screen, you are also voice chatting.

thoughtpalette• 2 years ago

This is a great point and looking back, is definitely the reason me and a huge number of friends made the switch on launch. Never underestimate free+cloud hosted solutions.

adamrezich• 2 years ago

One feature that seems (to me) to be highly desirable, yet Discord and every other service like it (that I'm aware of) lacks: the ability for moderators to select several messages in a given channel, and shunt them into a new thread, leaving a link to said thread in their place.

As I've never seen a service provide this ability, it could be that I'm mistaken, and that this wouldn't be as useful in practice as it seems in theory. But, theoretically, this would provide a nice middle ground between forums (and the pseudo-forum-channels Discord supports on Community Servers) and open, IRC-style general discussion. With this feature, users could casually discuss things as usual, but then move to a separate thread once a tangent becomes sufficiently lengthy/heated/etc.

amiantos• 2 years ago

Worse, I feel like Discord's threading feature feels incomplete without the ability to do this. It feels like it implies it can do this when you use the feature, that you'll be shoving associated replies into a thread, but it doesn't actually work that way and essentially fails at what I'd consider a basic requirement.

It would make more sense if it worked like Slack, but even then, you can't shove existing messages into a thread for some reason. There must be some absurd technical reason such a feature is impossible, or UX designers decided it was too complicated to design for some reason. There is no "multi-select" for messages at all in Discord, even to batch delete...

r0ks0n• 2 years ago

they had something like that but never went through with it

BadHumans2• 2 years ago

IRC leaking IP is the reason I never liked using IRC. The complaint about Discord being oriented towards games and memes is silly to me. I'm in Discord channels that have nothing to do with games.

floren2• 2 years ago

You can configure some IRC servers to mask all IPs by default, for instance the Ergo IRCv3 server does so automatically: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/MANUAL.md#...

tredre32• 2 years ago

Cloaking should be opt out, not opt in. Because even if you go through the process of begging for a hostname cloak, there are many scenarios where the cloak is temporarily not applied (netsplits, or if NS lags and your identify happens after joining your channels) and oops the IP leaks. This is unacceptable. It should default to privacy.

The fact that server operators of many (all?) networks refuse to enable cloaking by default just shows that IRC has a very different culture than what modern users have come to expect.

In my mind there is no reason for cloaking to not be enabled other than "it's always been that way and I like seeing ISP hostnames when people join!".

prophesi2• 2 years ago

I use The Lounge on a VPS to solve that problem. It's a good practice in opsec instead of giving up entirely and sending it all solely to Discord.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/12926016807575...

I can't escape Discord because of the network effect, but this recently rolled out in one of the servers I'm in and it can't even be turned off at the server level. Only at the individual level. Servers can also enforce phone verification. And at the end of the day, getting someone to click a link you control to see their IP is simple enough on any platform.

BadHumans2• 2 years ago

This just seems like a lot of work when the reason Discord won was ease of use.

KTibow3• 2 years ago

This site does some shadows on the links that makes them unreadable with dark mode extensions.

KTibow3• 2 years ago

For reference, I see this: https://ibb.co/bRVBdr0

pushcx2• 2 years ago

My stylesheet doesn't have a dark mode and is kludged out of the fairly popular tufte.css, so it's probably worth your while to report this text-shadow bug to the browser extension you're using to create a dark mode.

solidsnack90008• 2 years ago

Sometimes I think we need a new kind of organization for these kinds of things.

On the one hand, for people to work on it a lot, they need to be paid. Otherwise, they will be paid to do something else. So that would seem to indicate we need a corporation.

On the other hand, for it not to fall prey to the unfortunate expansion-stagnation-collapse life cycle of social products, it would seem it needs to be steered for the benefit of the world and the users. A corporation really cannot do that: a corporation is motivated by the interests of the people owning it and the people working there. While these interests frequently coincide with the interests of the people using whatever the corporation sells, there are also frequent failures to coincide which, when we consider something that is effectively infrastructure or a public good, is a problem.

Maybe a workable solution requires two organizations: a non-profit that supervises a corporation.

dragontamer5• 2 years ago

Maybe we should have the government develop societal software. You know, outside of military applications.

There's basically three organizations worth talking about. Governments, Corporations, and non-profits. If Corporations and Non-profits are out, the remaining one to do something is Government.

solidsnack90008• 2 years ago

Well, what if that's not how it really works, even for military applications? You know, a lot of the military software is made by private corporations. It's done under government supervision, but it's not made by a government "Department of Software". Consider, too, that the government doesn't generally build roads -- that would imply every state or the federal government would have some civilian equivalent to the Army Corps of Engineers. Generally, the government contracts out to specialized road building firms. The road building companies are better at building roads, better at fighting with the road building machine companies, and better at getting good raw materials than the government, while the government is more focused on the road being right in a bunch of ways -- being in the right place, having the right safety features (so the government doesn't have to deal with too many accidents), dovetailing with other roads made by other road companies -- and that is how things actually work out. There are, I think, pretty good reasons for that. What do you think?

This structure also shows up with non-profits. For example, a foundation wants a museum. They work with various specialized, for-profit companies to build the building, put in the art preservation system, put in the security system, &c. However, even though it would seem everything could happen with just companies, the truth is, the composition of their efforts that makes a museum would not make sense if it were animated solely by those companies pursuing profits -- it is only the beneficial purpose of the museum that brings their efforts together in that way.

This points to a consistent, repeatable composition of organizations as a solution; and it's not something so novel.

The government may be able to manage something like Postgres; but I suspect it is more like a museum: we need a certain kind of stakeholder in the governance of the organization that is simultaneously broader and more narrow than the government. For infrastructure software, social networks and similar things, we want, on the one hand, an international assortment of stakeholders -- and we also want stakeholders who have some kind of real connection to software.

squigz2• 2 years ago

It certainly wouldn't solve all problems, but free open source software helps alleviate this considerably.

solidsnack90008• 2 years ago

What does it alleviate? How does it alleviate it?

It seems like your reply not really with reference to what I said. What does free software do with regard to "...for people to work on it a lot, they need to be paid."?

abdullahkhalids2• 2 years ago

a serious culture clash that prompts most of the UI problems
Discord is oriented to mass-appeal to passive consumption of games, gossip, and memes
Lobsters is about creating, learning, sharing experiences/expertise

This is not fair. There are plenty of learning oriented communities on Discord. I have run several, and they work very well.

I am not sure why the author didn't consider Matrix.

doublerabbit• 2 years ago

Jabber is what it should be. However the clients then lacked for the features Jabber boasted.

This then caused it to sink in to the puddle of mud forming a living fossil as like of IRC.

vermaden• 2 years ago

Discord is more or less just IRC in the browser ...

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

An airplane is more or less just a horse in the sky.

unsignedint3• 2 years ago

IRC is heavily session-oriented and works well with a persistent connection. However, when you start using multiple devices, such as PCs and mobiles, you encounter issues with fragmentation. It’s fine if you're only using a PC, but mixing multiple PCs and mobiles can quickly become chaotic. The lack of push notifications can also drain your mobile battery.

The biggest complaint I have with IRC is its assumption of synchronous communication. If you're not connected, you won't get a backlog. People suggest setting up a persistent proxy, but this feels like a quirky workaround that doesn't fully resolve the issue. Plus, for it to be effective, everyone needs to be configured that way, which isn't practical.

Additionally, any media other than text needs to be transferred off-band, through DCC or other file transfers.

While Discord isn't perfect, it eliminates many of the issues I experience with IRC. Ultimately, it depends on your use case, but IRC's assumptions don't work for me or my peers. That's my two cents.

drbig2• 2 years ago

The biggest complaint I have with IRC is its assumption of synchronous communication.

But that's like complaining that the assumption of water is that it is wet.

_Chat_ by definition is right here right now. It is not mail, pager, bulletin board, forum, or... water.

And indeed we have "persistent proxies" but we call them bouncers[1] and they have plugins and stuff all figured out in the _thirty plus years_ IRC has been around.

IRC does one thing and does it well enough to be older than all the social media, and to outlive it too.

Making your own bot[2] is easy, and "persistence" can also be done by having... wait for it... public logs[3]!

And yeah I use Discord too, it's fine while it lasts. On IRC networks since... 1997, and still here and most useful.

1: https://wiki.znc.in/ZNC 2: https://github.com/drbig/catabot 3: https://github.com/drbig/chatlogger

unsignedint3• 2 years ago

That's why I said, "Ultimately, it depends on your use case, but IRC's assumptions don't work for me or my peers." If it works for you, great. It doesn't for me. (Believe me, I used to use it a lot back then.)

For one thing, I chat with people not just to chat, but to communicate effectively. IRC simply doesn't provide the functionality that aligns with my use cases. It doesn't meet the expectations I have for such systems right out of the box.

Creating and maintaining bots or workarounds just to communicate effectively isn't high on my list of priorities, given everything else I have to do.

rstuart4133• 2 years ago

the not-so-pleasant bridge to Libera Chat.

That's gotta be one of the understatements of the year. Very complex set up, almost no useful "how to use" documentation, and numerous outages made me give up on it.

As for why there is no good open source ones, it seems simple but is complex. What is often summarised as "text chat" becomes a long list of requirements when you probe deeper. People want history, power efficient notifications, be able share stuff like pictures and PDF's and when you press they always want to talk, video chat (with a funky background please), and broadcast their desktops and cameras too. And stickers. Who can function without a personalised sticker pack? They want e2e encryption, no unencrypted messages stored on servers, rooms lots of people that implement all those features, and hey don't forget infinite chat history. Oh and public rooms, with no central server, and provision for bot automation (with an AI plugin to reduce support questions of course) but no spam please. They want hierarchies of users in those public rooms - admins, mods and regulars and newbies. They want to be able fork threads and subgroups. They want a web interface, and a app, and gateways to all the protocols they prefer using despite all the effort you put into this one. And being open source it must be a lightweight and easy to understand protocol, with trivial setup.

We've had three attempts - IRC, jabber and matrix. None are there, IRC least of all. But IRC is simple and mostly just works.

Discord vs. IRC Rough Notes

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