> What makes IRC special or different in your view apart from being old?
I don't have a tonne of experience with all the chat offerings, just lots with one of the big ones, but to me the main flaw the new ones seem to have is that they have these "threads". Maybe I'm old and senile ("skill issue"), but if you reply to a message of mine into a thread, there's a 99% chance I'll never see it.
Maybe this is a UI issue, not a skill issue.
I have asked other people how they manage to follow updates in threads in order to see updates, and the answer seems to be that they don't. They just accept that many messages are just never seen by anybody. So it's not just me.
IRC doesn't have this. Starting a new channel, while extremely low effort, is not as integrated in the message flow. So people don't, the way they spawn threads left and right in new chats.
A second reason, in my experience (which may be atypical), is that IRC is seen as obviously not a replacement for a design or an email. But because new chats have more of an illusion of being authoritative rather than ephemeral, more people go "oh the rationale for that is in the discord/slack somewhere", whereas nobody with shame would ever say that about IRC.
> archivability and searchability and I'm really not sure an IRC log fits that bill any more than a hypothetical Discord log.
Yes, the Discord log is much better. But that's one of my points. It's better, so people choose it over something more suitable. So it's not "worse is better", but "better makes worse".
> I have asked other people how they manage to follow updates in threads in order to see updates, and the answer seems to be that they don't.
How do you do it in IRC?
The only way you can guarantee that you see all messages is if you read all messages. You can do that on Discord (it keeps track of read/unread messages) or on IRC. Obviously this is unreasonable if the Discord server/IRC channel is high-traffic. I really don't see how the two are any different in this regard.
I do take your point about the rest. You're saying that the differing capabilities cause people to use it differently and that is a point I hadn't considered. If IRC doesn't offer threads or pinned messages then you have to put documents outside of it and that might make it easier to find/index etc.
The question was how to see that threads are getting messages, and following them. IRC doesn't have threads, so doesn't have this problem.
On a higher level, how do I follow different conversations happening on IRC at the same time? I wouldn't say it's ever been a problem, in the decades that I've used IRC.
Hell, I use some IRC bridges that just flatten all the threads into one timeline, and that works much better too. Yes, in theory someone could just reply "yes" 10h after the previous message on a thread, and you have no way of knowing "yes to what"? But in practice that basically never happens.
Now, if the sender of that message had been on IRC, they would have instead said "yes I'll come to the dinner". Which would have been REALLY helpful on Chat too, because people may get popup notifications (phone or desktop) that just say "yes", and now they have to find (much harder than it should be) and open the thread to even know what the question/topic was.
And yes, people will probably also adjust their timelines a bit. Like if there's a major outage, maybe in modern Chat people start a thread to discuss a weekend trip (though do they? I'd expect them to start a completely separate group chat), whereas on IRC maybe they would go "you know what, this discussion can wait until after the outage". But people do that with modern Chat too. It's not just that the Chat is busy, the people are busy too, so you wait.
Still, there's no problem having a couple of conversations.
If you feel like I'm not answering your question it's probably because you seem to be saying "how do you solve this problem in IRC?", and I honestly don't understand what the problem is.
I have a WAY harder problem keeping up with newer chat. Right now on my work social chat my full desktop monitor has enough vertical space to show a whole 5 messages. My IRC on the side on a smaller monitor is showing 28 messages at once.
Now, because the Chat is Google Chat, those 5 are all I'll ever see, because if I try scrolling up, the page starts dynamically populating messages, causing a bunch of scrolling, flipping pages up and/or down losing my place, so I just give up and chase the ephemeral "Jump to bottom" button before it decides to disappear.
I'm pretty sure Google Chat is the worst of all options in terms of UX, so I'm not saying Slack is as bad.
> You can do that on Discord (it keeps track of read/unread messages)
In my experience the number of threads people create will greatly exceed the ability of even a "supertasker" to keep click-click-clicking to follow. Basically if this isn't the thread you have open, you're not on it.
> Obviously this is unreasonable if the Discord server/IRC channel is high-traffic.
If an IRC channel is too high traffic, it tends to topic split into another channel. And IRC clients can certainly keep track of what you last saw.
> pinned messages
Channel topic serves that purpose, I think. Or maybe not for the way you use pinned messages?
I think the only functionality I'm missing in IRC is the ability to attach images and receive them inline if needed. Gotta have the memes. And some clients (e.g. irccloud) do support that.
I don't have a tonne of experience with all the chat offerings, just lots with one of the big ones, but to me the main flaw the new ones seem to have is that they have these "threads". Maybe I'm old and senile ("skill issue"), but if you reply to a message of mine into a thread, there's a 99% chance I'll never see it.
Maybe this is a UI issue, not a skill issue.
I have asked other people how they manage to follow updates in threads in order to see updates, and the answer seems to be that they don't. They just accept that many messages are just never seen by anybody. So it's not just me.
IRC doesn't have this. Starting a new channel, while extremely low effort, is not as integrated in the message flow. So people don't, the way they spawn threads left and right in new chats.
A second reason, in my experience (which may be atypical), is that IRC is seen as obviously not a replacement for a design or an email. But because new chats have more of an illusion of being authoritative rather than ephemeral, more people go "oh the rationale for that is in the discord/slack somewhere", whereas nobody with shame would ever say that about IRC.
> archivability and searchability and I'm really not sure an IRC log fits that bill any more than a hypothetical Discord log.
Yes, the Discord log is much better. But that's one of my points. It's better, so people choose it over something more suitable. So it's not "worse is better", but "better makes worse".