AFAIK you can completely ignore the letters, because taking you to court would be very costly and might not end well for them. However, they keep doing it because some people get scared and pay up right away.
It's time to accept that 99% of people will not accept the loss of "features" (not sure why that's in quotes) or move to something objectively inferior for their needs i.e. something that requires more knowledge instead of simply opening an app where everything is ready to use.
Coming from a former heavy IRC user who's not going back except for nostalgia trips.
I can definitely vouch for this! I've been using it for many years and it's been essentially the same the whole time: fast, lean and working on all operating systems.
As someone who spent countless hours on IRC when I was younger and enjoyed 99% of it to the fullest... I'd kindly suggest refraining from pushing IRC any further. It has had its run, and while I know it still exists, it's nowhere near what it once was and it's not coming back.
Times have changed and people have different expectations. Nobody (except very few) is going to use multiple services and set up a bouncer just to get the basics working. It's better to spend time building a good replacement that keeps up with current needs than trying to push these old systems onto people, especially younger ones.
I'm all for alternatives as long they're based on open protocols and truly open apps -- not some where a corporate entity gets to dictate how many users one may have or how many lines you get to store. It should also be fairly easy to connect to and not every open-source project needs E2E encryption. Matrix is probably okay, but I found it (and the apps) fairly cumbersome.
IRC obviously has its limitations, but it shines as an example of simplicity and maintainability with no corporate strings attached.
The corollary to times changing is that periodically what's old is new again. We can't have our cake and eat it too; if the gripe is that for-profit services become enshittified, then necessarily FOSS should be given a shot, but adding to that I'd say some of these platforms re-invent the wheel or add a coat of paint. What you can do with Discord you can already accomplish with a mix of IRC, vbulletin forums, email, Mastodon, and and others in decoupled fashion.
I take the point that a one-stop-shop is nice and probably viable leveraging this tech. At the same time, users already use a slew of different social media platforms that are usually redundant or overlap in some way. For most their mode of consumption is "the algorithm", endless feed of videos. Discord's core offering is not that, it's an orchestration of chat, video-chat, forums, notifications. It's a swiss-army knife.
What we really need to get rid of is platforms. vBulletin sells you software. It's up to you what you choose to use it for. Platforms like Discord and Reddit need to have final say on a lot of things because they need investor/advertiser cash at some point. And by 'get rid of' I mean avoid using them in settings that would be severely impacted by a platform's decision. For example, I don't want to have to upload my ID just to ask a question on the DaisyUI discord server.
My cynical view is that this already exists, and people will still move to platforms, either because it's the next-popular-thing or there's less friction.
> 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't.
I feel like long before LLMs, people already didn't care about this.
If anything software quality has been decreasing significantly, even at the "highest level" (see Windows, macOS, etc). Are LLMs going to make it worse? I'm skeptical, because they might actually accelerate shipping bug fixes that (pre-LLMs) would have required more time and management buy-in, only to be met with "yeah don’t bother, look at the usage stats, nobody cares".
Every successful software project reaches an equilibrium between utility for its operators and bugs, and that point very rarely settles at 0% bugs [1].
When software operators tolerate bugs they’re signaling that they’re willing to forego the fix in exchange for other parts of the feature that work and that they need.
The idea that consumers will somehow not need the features that they rely on anymore is completely wrong.
That leaves the tolerable bugs, but those were always part of the negotiation: Coding agents doesn’t change that one bit. Perhaps all it does it allow more competitors to peel away those minority groups of users who are blocked by certain unaddressed bugs. Or maybe it gets those bugs fixed because it’s cheaper to do so.
I don't think LLMs are the root cause or even a dramatic inflection point. They just tilt an already-skewed system a little further toward motion over judgment
>If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that.
Exactly. Years go by and HN keeps crying about this despite it being extremely easy to understand for anyone. For such a smart community, it's baffling how some debates are so dumb.
The only metric really worth reviewing is resource usage (and perhaps appearance). These factors aren't relevant to the general population as otherwise, most people wouldn't use these apps (which clearly isn't the case).
I've been taking 6000-8000 IU of vitamin D daily along with K2, with no issues. I recommend using drops instead of pills as they allow for more flexible dosing. They aren't more expensive either (in my experience, they're actually cheaper).
