You only let users design a product or tool if they are better at it or more correctly if you are even worse at it. Users don't want fire exits or seat belts. They basically want tasty food that kills them. It if can be more tasty and kill them faster they all want it. Even better if the product kills other people but silently and far away. If it can be slightly cheaper and kill many more people you've done well in their opinion.

Of course sometimes having the user design the product or tool is the only available option. Just remember it is a terrible thing when it happens.

That's a funny comparison (with fire exits and seat belts), because IRC is none of it

Plain text protocol with poor (and optional) auth? Please where are the adults in the room

"oh but extension XYZ etc" yes and how many servers do implement that in a mandatory (and user friendly) way?

The user wants their images and reactions and I can't blame them because it's the 2020's and IRC was already limited 20 years ago

haha, I use IRC all the time but don't necessarily disagree. Imagine if we could post images to HN! Or wait...

> They basically want tasty food that kills them

What do you mean "they"? I'm the dev in this scenario and I also prefer to eat tasty food that supposedly kills me. I know how to count my calories.

> sometimes having the user design the product or tool is the only available option. Just remember it is a terrible thing when it happens

I'll continue to have my users design my product/tool every time and those who don't will get eaten alive in any market that has consumer choice. Also Santa Claus isn't real.

> I'll continue to have my users design my product/tool every time and those who don't will get eaten alive in any market that has consumer choice. Also Santa Claus isn't real.

Somewhere, the ghost of the man responsible for the iPod and iPhone is laughing at you.

Let me try...

Besides clients/users you have (not in any order): investors, employees, security, stability, sustainability, usability, education, learning curve, ethics, morality, honesty(?), the community, the environment, the economy, humanity, history...

I'm sure I'm missing a dozen things.

We already had that with Jabber.

Jabber had custom emotes and integration with desktop software including video games? I don't remember that.

Pidgin had lots of plugins (emotes too) and on integration with video games, that depended on the game and protocol. Twitch uses IRC for instance. You could use any IRC client to comment on your channel, and you could broadcast to Twitch with common tools too, by just using FFMPEG to encode your video stream to h264.

> Pidgin had lots of plugins

Maybe if they spent 1 minute thinking about their software as a product and decided to enable those plugins by default, Pidgin would be relevant in 2023.

>Twitch uses IRC for instance

That's not at all what I'm talking about, Twitch has nothing to do with Discord.

Eg your friend's Discord status shows you what they are doing in-game and many games let you join your friend's team directly from discord.