
Ask HN: Why don't more people know about Freenode? - datafix
The freenode subreddit on reddit has less than 200 subscribers. Imagine if every programmer knew about freenode. We would have such a rich exchange of ideas, and probably better open source software.
======
tony
For chat, people will use Slack, Discord or Gitter. These new chat apps have
clients on Linux/Mac/Windows and mobile apps and log messages remotely out of
the box, where as with IRC, it requires additional setups and the solutions
can be porous.

The other thing is IRC is one of those things where instant feedback isn't
guaranteed. So many /join, ask a question, and /part by the time I even read
it. In those cases, there's StackOverflow (and to a lesser extent reddit),
where a thread is created and upvotes help a post weigh upwards a bit longer.
As icing on the cake, there's nesting / voting in the conversation, as well.

With IRC, messages fade away and its really a matter of timing you find
someone with the right expertise that bites. If you ask something at the wrong
hour, you have to hope someone reads far enough up to answer you.

On StackOverflow, people are very generous in pointing to a newer answer with
less votes. It's easy to copy and paste code snippets. Posts can be edited.
StackOverflow posts are also more persistent as there's a concept of
duplication and trying to have one thread for a question.

~~~
giancarlostoro
> With IRC, messages fade away and its really a matter of timing you find
> someone with the right expertise that bites. If you ask something at the
> wrong hour, you have to hope someone reads far enough up to answer you.

This is what connection bouncers solve. I think IRC just needs a good client.
IRCCloud is a good client and bouncer service, cheap too. I can keep track of
IRC convos from forever ago.

The only thing stopping an IRC client from being as resourceful as Slack or
similar is the client developers. I've seen clients that preview images like
Slack does, long before Slack was a thing. I think the KDE one does this? Or
at least Quassel does.

------
runjake
I spend every day on Freenode but it’s important to mention that Freenode is
now operated by London Trust Media aka Private Internet Access, a beloved VPN
service that was just bought by people with a shady past involving malware.
Something to consider here.

~~~
Swant
I wouldn't say operated by. PIA is the largest sponsor but the network is
operated by independent volunteers.

~~~
runjake
PIA went from a Freenode sponsor to owner a couple years ago.

[https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn](https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn)

------
esotericn
> The freenode subreddit on reddit has less than 200 subscribers.

Er, yeah, because they're on bloody IRC?

Tons of people know about Freenode. I barely ever use chat platforms other
than IRC excepting communications with family.

It seems like a meme to me to pretend IRC is dead. It's about as dead as
email.

------
cahoot_bird
For better or worse, other platforms such as Slack, Discord, and Gitter have
beaten IRC in attracting new programmers.

While IRC is a little more open as a protocol, the reality is it lacks the
features these other platforms provide in attracting new visitors. In my
observation this might include: Mobile support, being able to see past
messages, emoji, embeded video/gif, having a company maintain and add
features, and being somewhat less anonymous.

I doubt IRC networks such as freenode will disappear anytime in the near
future, but I doubt it will grow much either given the alternatives.

~~~
wlesieutre
People often bring up that you can set up a persistent relay to give you
message history on your mobile device, which is accurate in the same way that
you don’t need Dropbox because you can just rsync a folder with your server.

Technically true, but not going to get mass adoption against more convenient
alternatives.

------
1ark
Been trying to get back into IRC recently. Because of nostalgia. Like some
others said, and I am realizing, it is not a very good place to exchange ideas
or even ask about problems. Chat is not good for these things. Forums, mailing
list, StackOverflow etc., even Twitter is much better, because everyone have
time to craft and edit their messages, and think things through. It is usually
archived and searchable. In chat, the message is easily lost or the
conversation has carried on to another topic before you are able to respond a
long message, like this one.

~~~
Kim_Bruning
It's really good for troubleshooting though. Once people start helping you
it's a very powerful tool. It also helps immensely wrt absorbing the culture
around a particular language or system.

Often a group of people will have an IRC channel, a website, multiple blogs,
servers, etc. It's one tool in a spectrum of tools.

------
gregf
In my experience asking questions on irc is pretty much useless. A lot of
times you just get try hard's they don't even understand what you are trying
to do that are determined they know more than you about what you are doing.
It's just frustrating. If I got a question I typically just sit on it for a
day two, and figure it out or ask on a forum. As far as chat, I much prefer
something like rocketchat/slack/mattermost because of the embedded data that
comes with it. A friend posts a funny YouTube video I just click play I don't
have to load open a browser and navigate to the link. When someone posts a
link you get meta data with the link so you can decide if you want to click it
or not. It's more streamlined that way IMO. IRC could easily integrate this
stuff but development of the standard hasn't really progressed that I have
seen.

~~~
boring_twenties
> A friend posts a funny YouTube video I just click play

Precisely why I prefer IRC.

------
SamReidHughes
IRC is not a great place for a rich exchange of ideas. I did learn a bunch on
it -- but I could have done so elsewhere.

------
Kim_Bruning
A lot of people do know about freenode though. It's a very large network. :-)

------
nitrix
Freenode has orders more than 200 users online, yet alone registered users.

I imagine the crowd that tend to use instant messaging don't see the same
appeal with threaded message boards. Different medium, for better or worse.

------
cjbprime
Back around 2000, I'd say that most open source programmers did know about
Freenode.

It was pretty cool: you'd sometimes have the experience of being frustrated
with a software project, guessing their IRC channel name on Freenode, joining
with your question and getting an instant answer from the main author of the
project.

But there were lots of things that weren't cool, mainly being unable to see
messages sent when you weren't online. IRC bouncers existed but most people
didn't have shell access to run one on; they were expensive.

------
kick
IRC is frustrating, Freenode prevents anonymity (blocks Tor users unless they
auth over clearnet first, as an example), graphical IRC clients are rarely any
good, Freenode isn't even the best network (Rizon), Freenode is owned by a
sketchy company (London Trust Media/Private Internet Access/the malware
distributor that bought PIA a few weeks ago), some more stuff that I'd have to
fill the character limit to mention.

------
kgwxd
I used to use it for Clojure(Script) but it seems to have just stopped
working. I put in a nick and channel and prove I'm not a bot, but the start
button doesn't work, no explanation. I'm sure it would take less time than
even typing this up to figure out the cause, but there are other means of
access to the Clojure community.

~~~
slenk
You seem to be accessing it through a website. There are a lot of other tools
for connecting to IRC - don't be afraid to try out Hexchat or some others.

------
colund
I my experience Freenode has lots of aholes like the admins in ##java who just
want to insult people who join, asking them to Google everything, Tia's (try
it yourself) and ban people who try to help since it ruins their feeling of
power. Very toxic, so I would recommend everyone to stay away.

~~~
rs23296008n1
I wouldnt recommend staying away. That implies the whole thing has no value.
I've used it and found it ok for what it is. The tumbleweed effect of no-one
around hits me due to timezones. That is a bigger negative to me.

My experience with freenode was similar to other forums. But I'd never be
surprised by an online forum containing aholes. It almost necessary as part of
a diverse ecosystem. How the forum deals with the bad is the real measure.
That's hard when the admin is the part of that bad.

I prefer Discord for actual online group tasks because just about everything
is better for our group's usecases, especially voice chat, bots, history,
images, video etc. Being text only, IRC is less useful now in comparison.

------
perceptronas
Reddit is a bad measure. Many people don't browse it. Most of the
content/users are from one political side making it an echo chamber and a
place to avoid.

------
peruvian
A lot of programmers don’t want to be on IRC and prefer Slack or Discord.
Simple as that.

------
geofft
I actively use Freenode (nominally for open source development, but in
practice for keeping in touch with my friends), as well as other IRC networks.

I don't think it's a good platform for a rich exchange of ideas or for
developing software for the following reasons:

\- Messages are one line long. I couldn't write something like this comment.
Much like Twitter, it's good for casual conversation with lots of people
reading and participating in realtime, but it's bad for in-depth discussions,
and you get the phenomenon where either complicated ideas are needlessly split
into multiple messages, or they're just not said at all because simple ideas
(which aren't necessarily correlated with _better_ ideas) drown them out.

\- As a result, it's hard to use it as a platform to design software. You can
talk about things, but you really want to switch to a place where you can
write multiple paragraphs for design. Even git commit messages accommodate
multiple paragraphs. Mailing lists are well-suited to this.

\- Also, you can't post things like crash logs, screenshots, diagrams, etc.
without using a third-party service.

\- There's no central public log. Yes, third-party IRC loggers exist, but
_Freenode_ as a platform doesn't offer one. If you want to exchange ideas,
it's important that they be recorded for at least some amount of posterity.

\- Relatedly, there's no way to read the history of a conversation if you're
not online at the moment. Again, yes, third-party IRC loggers exist, as do
bouncers, screen sessions, etc., but there's nothing built into the platform.

\- There's no threading or topic separation of _any_ sort. Even bulletin
boards of the early '00s let you subscribe to an entire bulletin board and
have multiple simultaneous discussion topics. The only way to do that on IRC
is to have multiple channels, and there's no way to keep subscribers in sync
across channels, so people tend not to create channels very often. Other topic
separation tools: separate threads on a mailing list, separate bugs on a bug
tracker, separate posts to Reddit or HN or Discourse, even Slack threads as
mediocre as they are, even _separate areas of the page_ on an unstructured
wiki (think
[https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreadMode](https://wiki.c2.com/?ThreadMode), or talk
pages on Wikipedia).

\- As a result, it scales poorly to large numbers of users. I was in #rust on
Mozilla IRC for a while when the language was young, helping people out; as
the room got busier, it became harder to have a conversation more than a few
messages long because something else would come up (and again, each message
had to be short, so it was hard to discuss anything of complexity).

I can't imagine any way to have _every_ programmer on it (the way that every
programmer could, theoretically, be on StackOverflow - and much less
theoretically, I'd expect almost every programmer _reads_ StackOverflow) and
have it possible to get any value out of it.

Also, this is the first time I've heard of the Freenode subreddit. Why would I
join it? What's the point of a communication platform _about_ a communication
platform? I'm also not in an IRC channel about Twitter, nor do I follow a
hashtag about GitHub.

~~~
BrandoElFollito
Your point about the length his true on other platforms as well.

I was recently automatically warned by a bot when I asked a question on a
discord channel. The question was detailed, with some code and about 20 lines
long. I got slapped because it is "spam" (and apparently hard to read on a
mobile which is not true after checking on my phone) . Others channels are
fine with that.

------
ta999999171
Matrix.org chats are growing.

