
IRC – Why It Failed (2018) [pdf] - Tomte
https://christine.website/static/talks/irc-why-it-failed.pdf
======
aquova
Is IRC really a failed endeavor? I would consider something to be a failure if
it never took off the ground, instead we have a protocol that is over 30 years
old being finally supplanted with newer technologies. There is no inherent
reason why IRC failed, except that it was designed with the sensibilities of
1989 in mind, but the requirements of the modern day are not what they used to
be. I enjoy the simplicity of IRC as much as the next guy, but when you have
things such as a lack of chat history availability being something you have to
work around, I understand why it has been supplanted by newer products, as has
a vast majority of things from those days.

~~~
dehrmann
> Is IRC really a failed endeavor

AIM not pivoting its social graph to be Facebook. _That 's_ a failure.

~~~
basch
Even to be a sms replacement. But I wholeheartedly agree, AOL and AIM failing
to become Facebook is an all time failure.

------
djhaskin987
To be sure, IRC is alive. I just know I've stopped using it a lot less. I make
the point that I (and perhaps many of us) used to use tools everyday that were
standards based, now they're not, and that's a shame. Especially true with
chat clients. It's like it's 1999 again, when you needed to be on MSN IM, AOL,
and Yahoo chat to reach all your friends. Then pidgin came along. What a
glorious standards based time that was. It was also the time I got into IRC.
Then slack came. All of a sudden the people I needed to reach were more likely
on slack then IRC. I also got on mobile around that time much later than
everyone else. That's when I really started using XMPP and IRC less. That's
all well and good, but now where are we? GroupMe, Slack and Teams open on my
laptop 24/7\. Multiple chat clients. Hello, 1999. It's been a while.

My point isn't "yeah it really is dead" but "man we need to get back to those
pidgin days somehow"

~~~
wareotie
100% true. I use IRC for work and I have that feeling every single day.

I would say this 1999 vibe is caused by smartphone and the "issues" that XMPP
and IRC have with multiple clients for the same account. But it's a pity that,
instead of improving those protocols, now we have to deal with multiple
clients for multiple services.

Why people understand that you can use email with whatsoever client you want,
but no with chats?

------
TekMol
It totally did not fail. It is the most useful realtime chat for many topics I
am interested in:

    
    
        #python for the python language
        #php for the php language
        #javascript for the javascript language
        #django for the django framework
        #laravel for the laravel framework
        #symfony for the symfony framework
        #startups for startup stuff
        #css and #webdev for web development
        #mysql for mysql and mariadb
        #math for math related topics
    

And many more.

Show me _any_ other chat system where you can go online, ask a question and
get answers from professionals in the field instantly. I would immediately use
it. But there is none.

~~~
DenseComet
Isn't the speed and usefulness of Q&A a function of the community itself and
not IRC though? For example, the Matrix devs hang out on many matrix channels
and are fast to reply to any questions. Experts over at the hackintosh discord
are also very fast to reply and extremely helpful to help troubleshoot issues.

~~~
TekMol
You give two examples of specialized communities.

But only on IRC you can instantly talk about any technology that you are
interested in and meet someone with knowledge.

------
strahil
Makes you question what failure is. IRC played an extremely important role in
spreading computer science knowledge, bootstrapping what we take today as a
granted IT world. It helped build communities for the introverts, with various
clients introducing basic scripting and programming technique to the curious
minded. For me IRC played an irreplaceable role in my life as a developer and
I would never be where I am if it wasn't for the networks built on that
protocol. I think that IRC never failed, it was just outgrown.

~~~
Thriptic
Also it had an enormous impact on early online gaming. IRC was the default way
many clans assembled, communicated, recruited, and coordinated match play and
scrimmages between each other. Channels like findscrim allowed CS teams to
match with other parties of equivalent skill looking for scrimmages in real
time all over the world, 24 hours per day.

~~~
johnisgood
Indeed, I remember when we wrote an IRC bot for organizing scrims, and it
would also keep a history of the results and so forth. Fun times. I miss it.
:)

------
epx
IMHO it didn't fail. The internet "failed", becoming something much more
centralized and oligopoly-like.

In my area, IRC servers were maintained by local ISP administrators plus some
help of local volunteers. As local, dial-up ISPs consolidated and ended up
absorbed or put out of business by telecoms, IRC networks become orphans.

~~~
clarry
I'm still connected to ircnet via my ISP's server.

Not that it makes much of a difference from user perspective. Freenode works
just fine and I don't need ISP's server for it.

------
michaelmrose
* An actual example session as experienced on gui clients is simply filled with people talking on various channels that the user has selected on prior sessions.

* Clients like hexchat are plain but functional. I'm sure if a designer was hired they could figure out a way to make it prettier and harder to use.

* I don't generally worry about mobile support because I prefer in depth discussion with a real keyboard on a real computer.

* It "failed" because most of the dumb people who don't have anything useful or informative to say prefer to say their nothings via the mobiles and you can't sell people IRC hosting at 10 usd per user per month.

* The only thing it really needs is trivial persistence via a cheap bouncer integrated into clients with fewer steps. As in add credit card number click go.

~~~
johnisgood
> I'm sure if a designer was hired they could figure out a way to make it
> prettier and harder to use.

I hate the UI/UX today. It is unbelievable how much information fits into my
80x24 terminal running irssi, whereas for example Discord takes up an entire
workspace and you cannot customize it to your liking, there is just too much
unnecessary spacing, and you cannot make the list of friends disappear and so
forth without using an extension. Discord started adding unnecessary crap
which made me resort to using uBlock to hide them. I cannot do this with
Electron apps, so I am using whatever I can (and have to) from the browser,
but I wish I did not have to use them in the first place.

In any case: IRC will never die for me. Xterm + irssi will never die for me.
:) I will continue growing old with my buddies on Freenode! :D

------
mistrial9
ends with "Join us on Discord" ?!?

today, I get a notice in email from Slack when Y-ImportantPerson speaks
directly to me, which means a record is entered in a graph database somewhere
that says "mistrial9 spoke to Y-ImportantPerson" \--meta-data-- .. I am
impressed by the addition of constant logging of all communications activity
on Slack, as a solution to hacking activity ??

Is this the same social promise that brought us directly into the F*Book era?
"people don't care" is not a real answer...

------
slumdev
IRC failed because your parents don't know how to use it.*

*Or, given that this is 2020, your parents probably do know how to use it, but your children can't be bothered to figure it out because the walled garden alternatives already have all of their friends online.

------
djhaskin987
tl; dr it was a standard and so could not improve fast enough with the
improvements being discovered around distributed systems and mobile needs. I
get the author's point, and we're seeing a lot of standards being outstripped
by entrepreneurs these days, but I hope things slow down and standards become
useful again. They are really important to maintain the open source world.

~~~
enriquto
Why are you talking in the past tense? IRC is alive and well and many people
use it every day. In what absurd sense this means "failure"?

~~~
user_50123890
Probably in that while internet usage exploded by 100000x, yet IRC is less
popular than ever with barely any new users.

~~~
michaelmrose
If you go to a nice restaurant that makes more than enough money to support
itself and you enjoy the service and the food and then someone builds 100
McDonald's all over the state this doesn't instantly transform the restaurant
into a failure.

------
astrobe_
> _All clients look terrible_

And that's the most useful statement in the document.

~~~
ungamed
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or not, but the visual aspect of irc is
probably due to it not always having multi Gb of RAM.

One thing ive never read is "why is my irc client using GB of RAM".

Food for thought.

~~~
tonyarkles
When Slack still had the IRC bridge, I participated in my company's team slack
using Irssi. There were a few things that didn't work great, but it was so
snappy compared to the official client and I could run it in a tmux alongside
everything else I was doing (I was in a devOPS role; light on dev, heavy on
ops). Plus it didn't fill my screen with animated gifs all the time... that
was nice.

There's still a community I hang out with on IRC, and I started thinking about
finding an IRC client for my new Macbook Pro (have been using X-Chat on Linux
for months). Just the other day on HN I learned about Erc, which is an IRC
client that's built right into Emacs. Tried it out last night and it's working
awesome so far! Now if only the 8 Slack teams I'm a part of would switch
over...

------
xwowsersx
It didn't fail. Not a perfect analogy, but saying "why IRC failed" is like
saying "why horse and buggy failed". IRC was quite successful. Still is
really, just is used a LOT less now.

------
st_goliath
Let me guess: next week we're gonna learn how e-mail died and nobody uses it
anymore?

------
xena
Author of the talk here, ask me anything!

~~~
bborud
I'm not sure I understand this:

> Clients joining and parting channels and servers didn't have much state

State and state management is the main design problem at the heart of IRC.
There's actually a _lot_ of state considering that this is state that has to
be replicated across all servers. (All servers have to know about all users
currently connected)

Servers are connected in a spanning tree. All servers need to have the same
state. State changes are initiated locally at each server and propagated
through the spanning tree (which simplifies state propagation a lot). State
changes take time to propagate, which means that servers will not have the
same view of the world at any given time. Network partitions means the servers
on each side of the partition have to forget all the state that belongs to the
other side of the partition. When networks join conflicting state has to be
resolved and there aren't really any good ways to do this.

Perhaps we have different views on "state". Perhaps you are talking more about
the user experience and not the design challenges inherent in the low level
design?

One thing that makes me very sad is that XMPP was such a pig's breakfast. It
would have been really nice to have a messaging system backed by an IETF
standard that wasn't infested with whatever technology was popular at the time
of its creation.

~~~
tonyarkles
> Perhaps we have different views on "state".

One of the common complaints I have heard about IRC is that there's no history
if you're not connected (contrast to, say, Slack). In most cases I consider
that to be a feature; one of my biggest complaints about the way many teams
use Slack is that it becomes both a real-time chat system _and_ the canonical
state of truth about decisions and how they were made.

It's a little more work, but I would personally prefer if chat was used to
discuss things, and then someone took the time to actually summarize the
discussion and conclusion into a document somewhere. Maybe it's Markdown that
goes into Git, maybe it goes onto a wiki, maybe it's just a long-form email
that people can review at their leisure. But there's got to be some kind of
better record than a disjointed Slack chat.

