The article here claims that IRC is better than Matrix because Matrix supports pasting long snippets and IRC doesn't. The author furthermore claims that Matrix users are being a "nuisance" by posting long snippets to IRC with a link fallback, like this:
ihabunek [m] sent a long message: < https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/blahblahblah >
ihabunek [m] uploaded an image: image.png (39KB) < https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/blahblahblah >
This is "being a nuisance"? It's just two chat lines, and the first line isn't meaningfully longer than a link to pastebin. Maybe pasting the image was a bit excessive, but it's very likely to be auto-expanded in GUI IRC clients, making it an excellent fallback. It's not "being a nuisance." It's two links. It's fine.
The truth is, IRC folks do need to share long snippets and images, and they do it by linking to them; that's exactly what Matrix does when integrating with IRC. That's one among many reasons that Matrix is better than IRC.
The issue with the "long message" thing is not pastes; it's that Matrix is misconfigured by default. When a user types a short but multi-line message, Matrix forces IRC users to click the link to see it, whereas sending multiple messages to IRC would be better. Or the beginning of the message, then the link, so at least we know if we're interested in the content.
I have seen a user who had half their messages replaced by a link, that was unreadable.
That seems like an extremely handwavy motivation, not much of an elaboration.
> When one side sees it embedded in the chat but the other side sees it as a link, it affects how the former uses the feature and how the latter perceives the former, in ways that could be unexpected to the former. The point of my article is that these features have a social effect which is not necessarily positive.
How does it affect it? What ways? What social effect?
This explanation is totally devoid of any concrete examples of a mismatch of expectations and resulting social effects, it just alludes to them existing without any concrete basis - essentially weasel wording.
Worth drawing attention to: many users are familiar and comfortable with the way that Twitter handles embedded content, which is more-or-less the solution that you said would be "less of a concern for you".
The truth is, IRC folks do need to share long snippets and images, and they do it by linking to them; that's exactly what Matrix does when integrating with IRC. That's one among many reasons that Matrix is better than IRC.