[Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

[André Pönitz]

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 07:04:01AM +0000, Eike Ziller wrote:
> > I hear will be forgotten a few days later. If I hear something important, I might
> > take a note, in an explicit, extra step. Under no circumstances I will be able to
> > "remember" something someone said in a room I wasn't in a year ago, my only chance
> > is to talk to someone who was. And this is a _good_ thing.
> 
> But for IRC this is an illusion.
> Even if you don’t run around with a voice recorder, other people are sitting in these
> rooms with voice recorders and record everything you say.
>
> Even if you forgot what you said, nothing is ever forgotten.

I don't have the illusion that it is truly forgotten. But most people in the world
won't have easy access to it. That's the point.

If they had, we wouldn't have that part of the discussion here that tries to make a 
point that IRC is bad technology as past communication is not (easily) accessible...

> And even though I see (I use Quassel) what the guy asked at 22:00 CET and never got an
> answer to, I’ll never be able to answer him. One lost opportunity to help someone.

And with forced registration that person might not have asked at all. Even if possibly
only because going through a "get temporary mail address, use it to register, accept
everything, perhaps solve gotcha riddles" ordeal is simply too much to go through for
one simple question.

We did see the number of useful comments to release blogs decrease after the system
changed, didn't we? I don't wonder why.

In another case, a person who would have been able to help might not have joined the
system for a similar reason.

So: No, logged history does not make things uniformly better, it just changes the
target group, incidentally closer to the one that is already served by other means
like the mailing lists and the web forum.

> So in the end one gets all the disadvantages (nothing is ever forgotten),
> without the advantages (async communication).

"Nothing is ever forgotten" is not the point. Any reasonable person has to assume
that this holds true for any word they say in the net.

There are already enough channels people who are fine with registration could use
to ask for help with their Qt problems. Forum, mailing lists, and whatever else
was listed already as "modern solutions". I believe there should be one channel
open for people who do not want that. This doesn't have to be IRC but IRC is filling
that niche currently. And it's the only input channel with that property we have left.

Andre'