You know, the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand. I don't know if you've had a look around you lately, but the modern internet is a dumpster fire.
Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want. You could use a pretty eye candy client, or then not. With the web, however, it's an impossible feat to implement a standards compliant browser.
> the people who talk about USENET and IRC are people who don't want to be "updated" to what modern users demand.
IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.
I disagree with your false equivalency. IRC is akin to a cellphone without voicemail, as when your disconnected from the network (cellular or IRC) you just don't get communications.
Scrollback and voicemail can be useful, but a good chunk of the population does not want either, hence unread backscroll and unconfigured/full voicemail boxes being very common.
>but a good chunk of the population does not want either
The largest Freenode channels I'm on like #node.js and #javascript have about 10 regulars max, myself included. It's pretty much dead for any purpose other than hanging out with a handful of curmudgeons feeding off a corpse out of habit.
Doesn't seem like "a good chunk" to me. IRC lacks the only feature I really care about in a chat network: new people to talk to, users.
I wonder how many HNers who praise IRC only like the idea of it but don't even use it these days, either.
And I haven't even heard HNers bring up usenet outside of downloading free shit so I know that's especially dead wrt this thread as a decentralized Reddit.
So it always makes me chuckle to see "yeah, well, some people like it like that!" which is apparently virtually nobody. Or it's like how my two friends and I loved the failed, abandoned supermall in my hometown because the three of us could longboard down its parking garage.
What makes IRC good is that it's a text-only chat with a wide range of highly configurable, blazing fast clients. Not supporting images, quoting or reactions could be considered a feature, since these distract from the actual conversation at hand (consider newbies clogging the conversation with screenshots, or 100 people adding reaction emojis to a message).
Young people now think it’s ok to send out a message and respond whenever they feel like it. Communication is no longer a conversation in the tradition sense, it’s a series of monologues or statements where the sender usually only cares about whether you are impressed by the statement.
IRC was all about conversation. You went there to have a conversation, like a party line voice bridge. You even waited around for someone to have a conversation with... oh I miss it...
This is like the famous comment in the "Show HN: Dropbox" thread that said you could just use rsync/ftp/git instead. Meanwhile Dropbox is now worth over $8B.
Not sure why the value of anything makes my point invalid? I answered there was a simple way for anyone using IRC to keep sessions alive and therefore not miss any message. This is an off the shelf solution, not something you have to build by yourself.
Synchronous and asynchronous communication both have their fundamental strengths and weaknesses. In a chat room you have the possibility of a real-time back and forth. That's invaluable at times.
You might have a preference for one over another, or each might be appropriate for different situations. But to claim one is objectively terrible is ridiculous and only makes you look like you haven't taken the time to understand it at its most basic level, or you're too solipsistic to be able to recognize the existence of value in something outside of your own preference.
Slack is a superset of IRC, except for the protocol not being open.
The UX in slack is not easily replicated in IRC (for example, how does/can global search work in IRC?)
Therefore, it is actually correct to say IRC is objectively worse in those measures. The only measure that IRC beats slack is the open protocol (which, if I'm being honest, not many users care,ala most existing chat services moved to private protocols and haven't lost all their users to IRC or xmpp).
> IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.
Well it's a good thing Slack and Discord don't work exactly the same way but with a nicer UI and no need for a bouncer to emulate a persistent session.
These two words next to each other really bother me. That something is "terrible" is not objective, whatever that means. All we have are our subjective valuations.
What I meant was more like, when viewed impartially rather than through the lens of nostalgia. Two people can do that and still have different opinions.
Your use case is what mailing lists or usenet are for, of course IRC is an objectively terrible mailing list, it's also an objectively terrible toaster.
However, the spam mostly died off now. It's possible to have great convos with boomers complaining about each other finally. A small number of people came back because of the pseudoanonymous qualities. Honestly the only thing that really sucks is Google Groups users bumping 15 year old threads.
Oh and binaries didn't go away, that's a feature and you just don't have to sync alt.bin.* if you want to avoid. I think it's great though for snatching rare/out of print stuff.
The spam died off because Usenet died off. If users ever went back to Usenet, the spam would come back again behind them. There's nothing in the design of Usenet that can stop spammers from spamming.
(There wasn't anything back in the '90s in the design of email to stop spammers from spamming, either; but enough people cared enough about email that billions were spent to add that spam-proofing. Nobody cared enough about Usenet to invest a similar amount, so it's still as unprotected as it was when Monica Lewinsky was in the news.)
Modern internet is both good and bad. Depends on the site. Generalizations don't work. However if those technologies are to ever be popular than they'll need to be redesigned to keep pace with what the vast majority expect, which is in response to the OPs comment. Otherwise you can already go post on usenet right now.
> "Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want."
Make it happen. This is my other point. People complain that all these fantastic legacy technologies aren't used but nobody puts in the work to modernize and use them. If it was that simple, where are all the companies doing it?
Is it companies, that would or should do it? Colleges and other publicly-funded entities are who did it the first time. Companies can only do what's profitable. (Or what they can convince investors will someday be profitable, but we can ignore that aberration in the long term.)
I didn't mean it that deeply, just that if people who believe these older technologies can drive modern incarnations then I would expect them to have produced products by now.
Citing UX in a thread about Reddit, the company with an almost universally hated redesign that moved away from a mostly text-based condensed format is... interesting.
Every user engagement metric has increased since the redesign. Unfortunate for some of us, and it doesn't preclude the metrics measuring the wrong thing, but that's reality on the ground.
Same reason why Gmail is a bloated mess, because that's what the metrics show is wanted by users.
> Every user engagement metric has increased since the redesign.
Doesn't that just mean that users are spending more time on the site because it's so much more of a pain to get what they actually want out of it? Like, you could increase "user engagement" of a shopping mall by turning it into a labyrinth and rearranging the shops every day.
Not necessarily for social media where there’s an endless river of entertainment content. I doubt most people go to Reddit for any specific purpose or task they’re trying to accomplish as quickly as possible.
Reddit is a corporation with a large amount of VC investment. Profit is a primary goal, and engagement that shows more time and thus more revenue is exactly what they want.
It would have been more honest of them to come out and just admit “yea, this new design is terrible but it juices our metrics and makes us more money so deal with it if you want Reddit to survive.”
Also, Protip: in case anyone still doesn’t know, go to old.reddit.com for the previous, better interface. Who knows how long it will be kept alive though.
> Also, Protip: in case anyone still doesn’t know, go to old.reddit.com for the previous, better interface. Who knows how long it will be kept alive though.
I'm using an extension to automatically redirect to the old one. When the old site is gone, I will probably leave Reddit, the redesign is too unusable for me.
The problem with that is assuming the new design is terrible for everyone. It very well could be that the majority do like it, and it's a vocal minority that complain.
The whole point of the redesign is to juice user engagement metrics and get that sweet, sweet ad revenue.
You don't need megabytes upon megabytes of nonsense just to avoid some full page loads. Or take al ook at something like HN where it's light enough that a full page load isn't a problem.
Ikea is a pretty much perfect shopping experience. It's the opposite of a labyrinth. There is exactly one path through the shop for people who want to just see everything and there are clearly marked shortcuts if you only want to see one area.
Where did you find these numbers? From what I've seen Reddit never released any sort of metrics other than saying one specific Audi ad campaign did like 10x better or something. And Alexa showed lower traffic, higher bounce rate, fewer pageviews per visitor after the redesign[1].
I don't disagree, but "engagement" does not necessarily reflect value to the user. Taking more time to accomplish one's goal (e.g., obtain information) than necessary may improve engagement metrics from the service's perspective, but from the user's perspective, that's extra time that might have been wasted and better spent on other things.
Maybe not value to each individual user, but in aggregate the numbers of users and content are increasing. Collective value and network effects are higher. This is also leading to more revenue which is critical for a corporation.
I'm sure they lose some users but they've gained far more than they've lost so far.
I wonder what will happen if they ever make old.reddit.com stop working?
I've been on the new design, trying to give it a chance, for over a year trying to give it a chance, and I still have to often switch to old.reddit.com to do some things.
1. The new interface still doesn't have the "other discussions" link to show you discussions of the same link in other subreddits. I think they said something like a year ago that they realized this was important and it was coming soon.
2. The new interface messes up scrolling on Edge on my Surface Pro 4 when viewing a discussion. Actually, for this one you don't have to switch to old.reddit to work around. All you have to do is hit refresh. When you refresh while on a discussion, that switches from the view that shows the discussion in an overlay on top of the thread list, to a more traditional page that just has the discussion. That page doesn't fuck with scrolling. Depending on how much I plan on reading and how long the discussions are, I may or may not get annoyed enough with this to just give up and switch to old.reddit.
(BTW, that discussion as overlay view also fucks up in-page search, because the thread list is still on the page, just hidden from your view--but not the browser's search functions--behind the discussion view, and so the search hits those hidden items).
The only thing I can find in the new interface that is actually functionally better than the old interface is the fancy pants editor. Aside from selecting tools/commands not always always working if it has to put them on the "..." pop-up, and it sometimes losing the ability to scroll the text being edited via the mouse, the new editor is a win.
If they would just put the new editor as an option on old Reddit, I think a lot of people would be happy.
personally I've probably spent an hour on Reddit in the last year. I used to spend a couple hours a day. After it modernized I realized it was just facebook for introverts and bailed.
Depends on how you define engagement. When you set all the videos to autoplay with sound of course users are going to be more engaged. They're either scrambling to figure out where that noise is coming from or "watching" the videos.
I guess that is only the case for the HN bubble and a loud minority. Also, people are always complaining about UI changes. Personally, I prefer the re-design, even though it has a few flaws. The old design was awful.
And yet Reddit is regularly down, and apparently today for hours on end. What's the UX of a service that isn't working? Do users not demand that a service be up?
There have been some really good modern Usenet clients. The biggest issue I see is that current browsers don't have built-in support for Usenet any more, and that's not something I can influence in any way.
Look, I loved Usenet back in 1994, it was one of my first great Internet obsessions. But it effectively died in terms of relevance before the turn of the century. The majority simply preferred web forums.
Usenet was always a pain to use, posts would routinely get mangled or dropped entirely, and the multiple user-driven quoting conventions and wonky clients made any long-lived threaded discussion impossible.
If only everyone who talks about usenet, IRC, and the rest could actually be bothered to update the experience to what modern users demand.