The I in IM
Instant messaging sucks. The “instant” part in particular. Being interrupted while trying to churn out code, sucks and reduces my productivity. When I’ve got my headphones on, it’s a sign not to interrupt me unless the building is on fire. When you’ve got your favourite IM client’s status set to BUSY/FUCK OFF/DND, people seem to ignore it and bombard you with piles of senseless drivel anyway. So I’ve stopped using any kind of instant messaging. The fact that all of these IM clients have megabytes upon megabytes of useless crap in them and generally misbehave on your network, is further ammunition against them. Skype is particularly bad. It even binds to port 80 for some entirely fucked up reason.
IRC, on the other hand, is amazing, and has been for over 20 years. It Just Works™. There are many clients for every single platform out there. It’s nicely standardized, so everyone can talk to everyone. It doesn’t make noise. It doesn’t get in your face. You can have group conversations, individual conversations, encrypted conversations without relying on a 100mb large untrusted binary from EvilCorp™.
Running irssi in a screen (or tmux, if you’re so inclined) on a VPS somewhere ensures that you’re always online and can look back and read conversations that you may have missed. And all without wanting to throw anyone off a cliff. Yay. Thank you, IRC.
Now if only more people would start using IRC again, then the world would be perfect.
And while I’m ranting .. what’s wrong with e-mail? Facebook messages are probably about as annoying as IM clients. One of these days I’m going to start slapping people with trouts for not using e-mail.
— Elric