Am I the only one who thinks that many of the listed gripes are core features?
> TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites.
Fair enough. This would be a likely problem with any non-private chat system.
> It won't preview gifs
Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party supplied fourth-party content? No thank you.
> No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7
Screen and tmux have been table stakes for decades. If you can not sustain a 400h idle, you're doing it wrong.
> Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone.
Which one do you want? Anonymity or privacy? I don't see how this is in any way different than our current-day antisocial networks.
-- -- -- -- --
But this, now this is a real problem in all modern communications:
> depraved and creepy stalkery stuff that went on was insane
This has always been a problem. In the 90's, IRC was a relatively low-friction method of getting online and talk to people. At least these days the creeps have largely concentrated on their selected forums, but back in the day having just one in any ISC channel was a real menace.
> Fair enough. This would be a likely problem with any non-private chat system.
No, because most non-private chat systems don't oblige anyone who wants to participate seriously to run a log bot. Of course any chat could be being logged, but most people don't bother if you don't give them a reason to.
> Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party supplied fourth-party content?
The whole point of being in a public chat is exposing yourself to arbitrary third-party content. Why would you want to read a message from someone you don't trust enough to load a gif from?
> Screen and tmux have been table stakes for decades. If you can not sustain a 400h idle, you're doing it wrong.
"It was hard for me, so it should be hard for you too." And IRC fans wonder why the younger generation don't want to use it.
> Which one do you want? Anonymity or privacy? I don't see how this is in any way different than our current-day antisocial networks.
People generally want persistent pseudononymity with some kind of reputation/integrity. When you DM someone on Twitter/Instagram/Reddit (or indeed on a phpBB-style forum), you don't have to show them your driving license, but you're reasonably confident they're the same person you were DMing yesterday. For most people that's a better tradeoff than IRC's "they could be anyone who's chosen to call themselves that, lol, good luck". Heck, HN accounts are the same kind of thing (whereas IRC is more akin to 4chan).
Also, impersonating a user is against Discord TOS. It's only if the user is actively portraying themselves as that user to others and not just a nickname switch and being goofy, IIRC.
Personally I think you should get nuked for a day minimum for doing it at all but whatever. Someone did it as me last year and was actually having conversationg an entire day or two before I saw them doing it and it confused the HELL out of me until I realized it.
I used to have a 2 or 3 character nick on Efnet + Freenode, prob others. I'm sure thats long taken by someone else now unless the nickserv never expires them.
There is a difference between receiving purely textual content, strictly encoded as text, from third parties and consuming arbitrary binary content from arbitrary third parties. The worst I can receive is bile and propaganda.
To this day, image and video codecs remain full of awful bugs. If you are on the receiving end a piece of data whose mime-type starts with "image/" or "video/", there's no telling what kind of malice you are up against. At best you are up against bile and propaganda.
Incidentally, I find it funny that disappearing messages á la Snapchat or whatever copycat the major tech companies have come up with is considered hip. But IRC with its "you were not online, so you missed it" concept is somehow undesirable.
> TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites.
Fair enough. This would be a likely problem with any non-private chat system.
> It won't preview gifs
Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party supplied fourth-party content? No thank you.
> No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7
Screen and tmux have been table stakes for decades. If you can not sustain a 400h idle, you're doing it wrong.
> Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone.
Which one do you want? Anonymity or privacy? I don't see how this is in any way different than our current-day antisocial networks.
-- -- -- -- --
But this, now this is a real problem in all modern communications:
> depraved and creepy stalkery stuff that went on was insane
This has always been a problem. In the 90's, IRC was a relatively low-friction method of getting online and talk to people. At least these days the creeps have largely concentrated on their selected forums, but back in the day having just one in any ISC channel was a real menace.
Disclosure: in IRC since 1992.