Google has removed the option to disable autoplay from Mobile Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/26214034 <comment><USER3> (disclaimer: I work at Google, not on Chrome)

The rationale here seems to be that by blocking video autoplay, Chrome incentivized sites shipping huge animated GIFs, or decoding video in JS and painting to canvas, both of which are very suboptimal for users.

Another comment points to this issue: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1063649#c8)

quote:

Unfortunately, full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when implemented as <video autoplay muted>.

endquote

This seems like a case of "the more you squeeze, the more sand trickles through your fingers?". Sites already have a way of always autoplaying muted video, but it involves either shipping 10x the bytes, or spending huge amounts of CPU and battery on decoding in JS.

Might as well let them autoplay muted video and save the user's network/CPU/battery.

<comment><USER4> Then maybe the solution is to also have the option turn off animated GIFs and perhaps frequent canvas repaints too; and not simply _give up completely_!

In any case, just leaving the option alone so at least it has _some_ effect like it did before, would still be better than essentially a full surrender.

<comment><USER5> This is the common sense solution.

And what sites are replacing videos with massive gifs? Buzzfeed-like sites have always been filling their pages with 250 megabytes of gifs. News sites with half a dozen autoplaying videos certainly won't be replacing their videos with multi-gigabyte gif versions. And it seems like detecting a large, constantly repainted canvas would be easy enough.

<comment><USER6> I dream of a search engine that heavily penalizes websites with advertisements on it.

<comment><USER7> Seems unlikely given the biggest search engine makes the majority of its money from ads :(

<comment> toper-centage Search engines dont earn money from ads on other sites though. The problem is that all alternative engines are based on google and bing, and that wont change soon, so there's no flexibility.

<comment><USER8> Google earns money from ads on all sorts of websites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A lot of comments here trying to explain this away but let me point out that Apple disabled autoplaying unmuted videos in moble Safari years ago (it's not even behind a setting as far as I know) and I can't imagine them backing off of that any time soon.

On the contrary, Apple will savage decades old APIs just to marginally improve privacy [0]. Which is what Google would do if users were the customer.

Apple is problematic in many ways, but I'm glad there's at least one mega- corporation that's really staked out privacy and user experience as a selling point for paying customers.

[0] [https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie- blocki...](https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and- more/)

<comment><USER10> > autoplaying unmuted videos

autoplaying unmuted videos have been disabled on almost every browser, on desktop and on mobile, for years. This isn't unique to Safari and Apple.

This is specifically about autoplaying _muted_ videos, which gifs and canvas can replace.

<comment><USER11> So block autoplaying animated gifs and canvas animations?

<comment><USER12> In the canvas case it wouldn't block the huge downloads, it would just stop them being visible.

<comment><USER13> Just by not being visible it would already be a better experience for the user.

<comment><USER14> You might be surprised how few users agree with you on this point - or rather, care enough to engage in the conversation at all. Blocking non-muted video is something most people are happy about. Blocking mute animations, I don't think many people are gonna waste much energy caring about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is weird. They see the general tech community slowly turning against them and they double down on all the wrong things they were doing that caused the negativity.

<comment><USER12> The general tech community is a tiny fraction of their user base, though. Put simply, they don't care.

<comment><USER16> I subscribe to the idea that the tech community overlaps with the definition of "early adopters", who become zealots driving everyone else's adoption

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle)

<comment><USER17> I agree. But I think the early adoptors mattered back in 2008.I reckon, with the dominance they now have, they are fine with some developers moving to firefox while still having time to react if they pull too many "normal" users with them. Especially since Mozilla isnt exactly peak popularity in terms of vision either.

<comment><USER16> IE was also absurdly dominant back then. I appreciate the fact that we now live in a world where everything is integrated, so the costs of switching are higher, but it's not impossible

<comment><USER17> Sure but IE back then was also severely lacking in pretty much every regard and stopped any tangible development. At least every developer I know back then switched away from it primarly because of developer tooling available in other browsers secondarly because of lack of other features.

With todays major browsers landscape the differences are much more subtle. From a developer productivity perspectice I don't think it matters that much anymore, none is really a 10x or even a 3x browser over the others.

So I don't see a huge developer exodus happing for Chrome as long as they don't completely cripple their web dev experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was curious about the rationale for this, so I did a quick search on chrome's issue tracker [1].

According to [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1063649#c8), it was removed because it didn't actually stop sites from autoplaying video:

> full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do > "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up > enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites > having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when > implemented as <video autoplay muted>.

(Disclaimer: I work on Chrome at Google, but not on media.)

[1]: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=media%20s...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=media%20site%20settings&can=1)

<comment><USER4> I notice your comment just a second after I posted this comment that suggests a reason: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24403934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24403934)

...and it turns out I was right! "It doesn't work all the time, let's remove it." Frankly, I really _really_ hate that attitude.

<comment><USER19> Well... not so much "it doesn't work all the time", but "publishers are reacting to the existence of this option by using grossly inefficient alternatives which we can't block".

<comment><USER4> Then let them...!

At least the option would have some effect, now it has none. That is clearly a worse situation than before.

Fuck this idiotic slow boiling of the users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't get why Firefox's market share is still so low when compared to Chrome's. I get why FF fell behind over the last decade, but since Firefox Quantum those reasons have largely disappeared.

<comment><USER21> Techies don't like to think about it, but it's obvious. The _only_ reason why Chrome has come to dominate the market is because Google leveraged their monopoly in search. And even beyond Google Search, if you used Google Mail or anything else by Google, they'd repeatedly put notifications telling you that Chrome is great and why don't you download it? Then there's using all those billions of dollars to pay everybody to help advertise Chrome by adding it to their installers as an opt-out. It's no wonder Chrome is everywhere, Google did their best to abuse their position to ensure that it was a foregone conclusion.

I wonder more about why people accept their anti-competitive behavior when Microsoft was shafted for doing pretty much the same thing.

<comment><USER22> Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows and made it impossible for users to remove it. That's not at all "pretty much the same thing."

<comment><USER21> Okay, do you care to address the core point of my comment? These are two examples of anti-competitive behavior. The details might differ, but the core idea of what they did and how they did it is the same (abusing their dominant position to anti-competitively disadvantage competitors). Yet Google gets a pass because "capitalism".

<comment><USER22> I've used Google search daily for many, many years now without ever feeling the need to use Chrome. I use Safari on my laptop and mobile Safari on my phone. I can't recall the last time I saw anything pushing me towards Chrome.

I'll take your word for it that these happens or happened, but I just tried a search in Safari and saw no Chrome ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Google continues the war against its own users.

<comment><USER24> Indeed. A list of Google's decisions that drive me crazy.

1\. Killing Google Reader 2\. Removing swipe from Google News feed (both Chrome homepage and News feed in Android that's part of the launcher) 3\. Deprecating Google Play Music and switching to Youtube Music (the interface is horrible and intended for videos). I'm a paying user of Google Play Music and this is idiotic. 4\. Random recommendations in Youtube, especially more of the same. I have to open one-off videos in a private window so that I don't get recommendations 5\. Minor changes in G Suite that make no sense (I'm forgetting what these are at the moment) 6\. Showing ads for everything even when I'm just looking for medical information 7\. GBoard suddenly asking me to add misspelled words to the dictionary 8\. Google Maps interface changes (all the freaking time)

I really wish Google would send all its PMs on a sabbatical for a while so that I can go about using these products in peace without random changes.

<comment> yoz-y Disclaimer: I work for Google

1\. I was annoyed at killing reader too. However, in hindsight before we had Google reader and that was it. Now there is Feedly, Feedbin and multiple self hosted aggregators. And a plethora of RSS clients. RSS did not "die" because of lack of tech around it but because majority prefers twitter and Facebook. Had Reader stayed, would people be lamenting its dominant position?

<comment><USER25> As your a google employee, whats the reason of google suddenly implementing YouTube "Sign in to continue" popups when I try to use YouTube?

I have cookies disabled however, with that, it means I then get the popup every single time I play the video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why not allow users to specify that they do not want any site with autoplay videos (in any shape) to show up in their top results? Alternatively - <USER2> Google shows a search result, indicate if the website has autoplay videos, this way I can avoid clicking it.

</comment><comment><USER27> This thread is a microcosm of the problems with the world at large atm. 70% of the response are people frothing at the mouth outrages over those evil "other people" when the other people had nothing but good intentions. Then absolutely refusing to see those good intentions and painting everything as poorly as possible.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure Google is entitled to any charitable opinions at this point.

<comment><USER29> Why? The engineers in the bug tracker seem to be making this change specifically to improve user experience. Trying to plug the hole by blocking gifs, canvas, and whatever people would think of next seems worse than just letting them do the right thing.

Google is a huge company with very little of what could be considered a unified vision. It doesn't make that much sense to talk about Google as a single unit but as many teams with vague corporate influences.

I think it's reasonable to be a little conservative when any decision you make has to work for billions of installs and every unknown website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't have Ublock origin, so mobile chrome is already a shit show.

<comment><USER31> Firefox on android did have the option to have ublock as an extension (luckily)

<comment><USER30> Yeah, which is why I stick with it even though they just butchered a few areas of the UI (most notably the home screen). Fortunately they seem to be listening to reviews and fixing things.

<comment><USER32> Does anyone know if there is a way in the new Firefox for Android to stop it from keeping my tabs open when I close the window without using "Quit"?

<comment><USER33> Yes, there's an option in Settings to close open tabs on quit.

<comment><USER32> Thank you for trying to help, but I think you missed a part of the question.

<comment><USER33> Ah, you're right. No, there isn't an option to do this without explicitly Quitting. I find it a glaring omission myself, along with the fact that deleting Browsing History and Site Data are combined into a single option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Clearly Google was listening to the hoards of users who were incessant in asking that auto-play be mandatory without exception.

(I know, sarcasm is lowest form of humor)

<comment><USER35> Googles users are companies that buy ads, so no need for sarcasm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > _How to fix before I abandon Chrome entirely?_

Why wait? Firefox on Android works fine and accepts extensions, including, yes, uBlock Origin. Your experience will be a million times better.

</comment><comment><USER37> Need to drag in the entire clusterf*ck of CDNs hosting ads that accompanies with each YouTube video because ... revenue.

</comment><comment><USER38> The cynic in me wonders about the timing of this happening shortly after backlash against the new Firefox mobile, and Mozilla lay-offs.

<comment><USER39> This change has been part of Chrome for many months. Look at the date on the report, for one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The Chrome Team really needs to be broken away from Google.

<comment><USER41> Who is going to pay them?

<comment><USER42> "Nobody" would be a better situation than we have now.

(Microsoft and Brave both depend on Chrome, however.)

<comment><USER43> *Chromium

<comment><USER35> Identical code, different name. I think chromium will even side load the closed source DRM module the first chance it gets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> As much as I find Firefox less than user friendly at times (by comparison), it is worlds better when it comes to blocking unwanted items and putting the user first (For example Multi-account containers).

I really wish that Chrome wasn't so dominant. Google has all it's incentives in the wrong place, and therefore can't be trusted to fight for the user.

</comment><comment><USER12> There's a [dead] post here from a Chrome engineer that links to the relevant Chrome issue:

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=106364...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1063649#c8)

> full autoplay blocking is counter productive as images and <canvas> can do > "video" playback just fine. We had this issue on mobile and ended up > enabling muted autoplay there to avoid that issues.We found many websites > having 100MB gifs that could be one order of magnitude smaller when > implemented as <video autoplay muted>.

The logic _kind_ of makes sense. Autoplay videos already have to be muted so there's no issue with sound. And if you disable video then idiot ad providers will resort to alternatives that chew up considerably more bandwidth and/or CPU.

I guess they need a setting to disable all canvas tags and GIFs _and_ all autoplay videos.

<comment><USER45> Doesn't slack look at the size of a gif and skip playing it if it's bigger than 4mb or something?

I'm reminded of Steve Jobs comment on 'toner heads' and why Xerox failed. Google is now run by MBA's and Ad people. So they will continue to do things like this.

<comment><USER12> It does, but the Slack servers still need to download the image first to know it's size. There's no equivalent for a browser. You could rely on Content- Length headers but then ad servers are just going to stop sending them.

<comment><USER46> You can download the first frame and then only download 4mb of the rest. If that's not the whole thing then don't download the rest. Or download up to 4mb and if there's more then ignore it and just pull the first frame from the 4mb. Or if the content-length isn't set then assume it's over 4mb and only download the first frame. Granted there's extra complexity in parsing the first frame from a gif in real time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The solution I've found is just to disable javascript altogether, then manually whitelist a small number of sites that don't work without js. Sure, a lot of the web stops working for me, but it's also probably the part of the web I don't want to see anymore anyway.

<comment><USER48> Just disabling 3rd party JS solves a lot of the problems. Still have to whitelist a lot, but it is easier than blocking which just feels like whack-a- mole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> If you're looking to switch and Firefox isn't your cup of tea, you'd probably like Kiwi -- it's based on Chromium and it has an integrated ad-blocker.

[https://kiwibrowser.com](https://kiwibrowser.com)

<comment><USER50> Why it's not mentioned anywhere on website that it's open source?

[https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src](https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src)

PS: Oops, another guy posted the link earler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> tangentially related: what's everyone's solution for blocking autoplaying sticky videos? By that I mean the kind that usually shows up on news sites or tech blogs. It usually manifests as a "recommended" video that's totally unrelated to the article at hand, and stars playing without you clicking the play button. If you scroll past the video, many of them convert to a sticky mini player that stays around wherever you scroll.

I've tried changing the autoplay setting from "block audio" to "block audio and video", but that breaks sites, especially the ones that assume you have autoplay enabled and don't have controls available. It's also hard to know when something's broken. I see a static image and I'm left to wonder whether it's a video that's hasn't started yet or it's actually a picture. For some sites, blocking autoplay don't even prevent the videos from loading because they start video playback during an onScroll event, which makes the browser think the playback was user-initiated.

<comment><USER13> Use UBlockOrigin, and every time you see one of those sticky thumb players, create a regex rule to remove it. I must have hundreds of those little rules in place on my browsers. I never searched how to send my list to one of the maintainers of the most popular ad/annoyance lists but I think now it's time.

<comment><USER48> I was doing that but it became frustrating, so I blocked all 3rd party JS and then whitelisted as I went around the web.

My filter list is here: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aembleton/Arthurs- Annoyanc...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aembleton/Arthurs- Annoyances/master/filter.txt)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Not really. Just disable JS and you are good as gold. Even though JS is not technically required, find a website that doesn't load almost all media assets using JS. And when you occasionally need to use JS, just share the webpage with another browser like Edge that has JS enabled. Guru level mobile browsing.

</comment><comment><USER53> YouTube Android now seems to autoplay but not when you are casting.

I haven't looked into it, who knows I might have flipped the switch.

But previously they would or would not autoplay on both as far as I can recall

</comment><comment><USER54> The real scandal is that people still using Google's Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER55> Soooo google wants Autoplay ads on their sites too now!

They're not about to make their own product limit their own whims!

</comment><comment><USER56> e option to disable autoplay on YOUTUbE was already somewhat hidden so that is not a big surprise....

</comment><comment><USER57> I just noticed the first, Netflix like, 'are you still watching' challenge on YouTube, never had that before.

<comment><USER58> This happens to me a lot, but my use case is "watching" full music albums all day. Usually halfway through every other album it will pause and ask I'm "still watching".

I usually just use the media controls on my keyboard to un-pause it without actually clicking the modal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This could also just be a mistake. There's often regressions or bugs in mobile chrome.

<comment><USER60> I mean, the issue literally is that the option exists, it just doesn't work. It doesn't sound intentional.

But then again, it was reported 9 months ago. It should have been fixed by now.

<comment><USER4> _the option exists, it just doesn 't work_

It might not be true in this instance, but I've seen so many times where "the option doesn't fully work and hasn't been working for a while, so let's just remove it entirely" has happened to features in other products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Don't be evil guys

</comment><comment><USER62> abandon Chrome? oh nooooo!

</comment><comment><USER63> I consider browser video autoplay more offensive than physical assault tbh.

<comment><USER64> Browser autoplay doesn't have the real-world consequence of needing medical attention and going thousands of dollars into debt.

<comment><USER65> > going thousands of dollars into debt

That is the case for only a single country in the whole world

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I don't understand what's the problem with auto-playing muted video.

Facebook and Twitter have been doing it in their apps. The mobile apps are more popular than the web pages. The exodus to native apps has already been happening. The web has evolved from the days of static text content, like it or hate it, if you stop the progress, the web will die.

And really, some suggestions don't make sense. Stopping the auto-playing of GIFs? That's the whole point of GIFs, and you're 15 years too late.</comment>


What American Startups Can Learn From the Cutthroat Chinese Software Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcolabs.com/3005191/

<comment><USER2> > Kobo says American startups like to develop products without the "impure" > influence of monetization, "but [in China] the development of a good product > isn't even thought of in the beginning," he says. "Chinese web companies > have a totally nonchalant attitude towards creating the actual products. > They are just a lot more focused on ways to make money from the outset."

...because they know that, due to their country's non-existent respect for intellectual property, they can just rip off the product itself from something created in America.

<comment><USER3> Similar to how America used to disrespect foreign intellectual property back in the day: <http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/khan.copyright>

'The U.S. was long a net importer of literary and artistic works, especially from England, which implied that recognition of foreign copyrights would have led to a net deficit in international royalty payments. The Copyright Act recognized this when it specified that "nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books ... by any person not a citizen of the United States." Thus, the statutes explicitly authorized Americans to take free advantage of the cultural output of other countries. As a result, it was alleged that American publishers "indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement."'

It's a tendency that nations (and startups) break the rules as much as possible in the early stages or when behind, and as soon as they're ahead seek to prevent others from getting similarly ahead by lobbying for stricter regulations and intellectual property rights.

<comment><USER4> (1) The current state of the world is more relevant to China then what we did in the past.

(2) In this case, Chinese entrepreneurs are constantly ripping off from each other, making the situation intolerable even if we ignore theft of global IP. Enforcing IP rights in China at this point would be good China, not just for foreign IP right owners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Chinese approach is similar to the approach taught in an entrepreneurship class I'm taking at the University of Michigan right now (ENGR 520). They teach a variety of tools and models, but most of them revolve around how to identify the high-value-capture activities in an industry segment, evaluate the barriers to entry and founder capability sets, come up with a strategy to get into the industry, and calculate whether or not the business is worth starting. For the purposes of the class, they encourage us to assume the business implementation (technology) will work, since the point is to figure out whether or not the business is worth doing in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER6> "...If you're not building a business, then what are you doing?"

Innovating, maybe?</comment>


Twilio Introduces SIPOut Beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/10/sip-is-here-sign-up-for-sipout-beta.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+twilio%2FOBEN+%28Twilio+Company+Blog+-+Discover+Our+Web+Services+API+for+Making+and+Receiving+Phone+Calls%29

<comment><USER2> When deciding which platform to use for our cloud based product, we went with Tropo for 2 reasons.

1) better international support

2) SIP support

I like Twilio and their API. It's nice to see them closing the gap. Albeit slowly.</comment>


IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival - <AUTHOR> https://irc.com <comment><USER3> As a routine user of IRC: This scares – nay, terrifies – me.

London Trust Media is colossal. They seem to have control over freenode and Snoonet, two networks basically unchallenged in their niche. Snoonet hasn't been doing so well since Discord, but that's another story. They also seem to own Private Internet Access. If a player becomes too big, they'll change the rules of the game. Just look at the state of Internet advertising: A few corporations probably know a lot more about most better than you wish they did.

Re "IRC University": Practically every non-trivial network has its own software stack of some sort. Trying to teach people every kind of IRCd/services combination is more or less doomed to fail. Mainly because people usually just _don 't want to know_.

Re "IRC Ventures": There's no money to be made on IRC, at least in its current form. Slack, Discord, etc. gained traction because IRC is fundamentally inaccessible. It does not meet any of the common needs of today: server-side storage of history, mobile-friendly data usage and session management, built- in uploading, profiles and profile pictures, first class support for emoji. Though whether addressing them is correct is another story. However, these would all need to be addressed to try and make IRC competitive on any kind of market. The IRCv3 team, which does have a decently broad amount of adoption, has had issues pushing through much more trivial issues. Hell, we don't even have everybody on the same page about _TLS_ – QuakeNet and UnderNet are still plaintext only. QuakeNet undeniably intentionally so[1].

Mark me highly skeptical of this undertaking.

[1] [https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not- transitive...](https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive- or-why-irc-over-ssl-is-pointless)

 _EDIT_ : Seems I misunderstood some points, see also neatnosleep's response to this comment.

<comment><USER4> > first class support for emoji

I'm sorry. Even in 2018 I cannot take seriously any claim that "support for emoji" is being used to make business case decisions.

<comment><USER5> I watched as a Lack of emoji support took down a critical production database for over 100 non-profit organizations in 2015 and made ripples across the charitable giving sector.

All because someone included a smiley emoji while making a donation to a local community foundation. Lessons were learned because of poor planning admittedly but if you don't take emoji support seriously it's probably because you haven't suffered through a critical outage from poorly supporting character encodings.

We aren't a chat company. We don't even write email clients. We process transsctions. And we lost millions because of a single emoji.

<comment><USER6> Sounds more like "Unicode support" or even "input sanitization" was the missing feature there. As long as you have bytes in = bytes out and you don't crash on unexpected input, you never need to know that emoji even exist to avoid these problems.

<comment><USER7> Yep, and this sounds even more fishy because the idea that no unintended unicode characters wouldnt be copied and pasted into a form field is a joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> London Trust Media recently hired Mt. Gox (yes that Mt. Gox) ex-CEO Mark Karpeles as CTO. [https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/22/mt-gox-chief-returns- as-...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/22/mt-gox-chief-returns-as-cto-of- vpn-giant/)

<comment><USER9> That would seem to immediately nullify the "Trust" part.

<comment><USER10> There's no "London" at play here either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can fairly say that it was IRC that introduced me to the coding world (where I learned to code TCL scripts for Eggdrops) when I was in high school and made me decide to switch my major to Computer Science after my first semester as a Graphic Design student (which I only chose because my brother had switched off Internet access from me for a few months which affected my judgment apparently)

<comment><USER12> I'm of a generation after you, likely, but I'm in the same boat. I learned python by maintaining an IRC bot, which started out rolling d20s. It then expanded into a 1000+ line monstrosity, which was a mess, but the features taught me many aspects of programming, and let me apply it. The bot has since been rewritten into much, much cleaner code, and is one of a few projects I'm proud of. All thanks to RFC1459.

<comment><USER11> One of my greatest achievements back then was allprotection.tcl[1] (over 2000+ lines of spaghetti) LOL but I have no doubt that TCL scripting taught me a lot and gave me a huge advantage during my studies!

I'm sure you enjoyed what you were doing ;)

[1] [https://github.com/sirfz/allprotection.tcl](https://github.com/sirfz/allprotection.tcl)

<comment><USER12> Hah, looks better than my original code. When it was starting to be created, I didn't even know how to write a function, and there were a grand total of I think two when it was retired. Here [1] is my updated code. Apologies for some edgy commands, my IRC server has some... interesting people in it.

[1] [https://hoppy.haus/git/Failure/MIPS](https://hoppy.haus/git/Failure/MIPS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm interested to see how they manage to convince communities to use their IRC services over competitors like Discord when so many users see Discord as easy, free, trendy, etc. Of course services liks Slack, Telegram, Skype, etc, are also potential competitors in this ecosystem.

>IRC Gaming (We're going to have literally hundreds of thousands in cash prizes!) I suppose literally paying users money is one way, but it doesn't sound very sustainable. Some of their other projects like "IRC Ventures (VC/Incubation on IRC!)" are pretty hard to imagine the specifics about, but hopefully we'll see some interesting positive actions sooner or later to show us what they really intend to do.

<comment><USER14> Are there any open source Discord clients?

So far, I've refused to try it because the only client Gentoo has is a binary blob.

<comment><USER15> There is a libpurple/Pidgin plugin for Discord. As you might expect, however, it only exposes text chat and not any of the "rich" features such as voice chat or emote reactions.

I don't know of any free software full reimplementation of the Discord client, and I suspect such would be against their terms of service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> IRC is great and IMHO still the best chat system we have. I'm active in a IRC- based community of programmers ([http://dailyprog.org/chat/](http://dailyprog.org/chat/)).

I'd like to know more about Andrew Lee (especially if he is reachable on IRC).

</comment><comment><USER17> Everything in this post except the personal sentiment could be about any semi- anonymous text based communication medium, be it mailing lists, web forums or any other chat system with group chats / channels.

As somebody who has been on irc for over 20 years now, and shares most of the sentiment, I still wouldn't invest into the tech. As others have written, the protocol simply isn't adequate for today's usage scenarios.

This is a problem that people have been fighting with some success on xmpp, which is far more flexible and is a superset of what irc provides, and there are the obvious web stack based solutions like Slack, Matrix and Mattermost.

Still, people rather use Facebook groups today, and we won't convert them by making irc better.

</comment><comment><USER18> We do customer support over IRC, on Freenode and OFTC. Particularly with the availability of web clients on Freenode, casual IRC users can reach us with minimal hassle while long-time users idle and voice when they're highlighted or the discussion interests them.

My experience of Freenode is improved since PIA's involvement. Staff lurk in our channel on-hand to help if something comes up. Last month when services went down a developer put their head in to talk about the outage and share the patch developed from the experience.

I don't think there is another chat platform with that kind of robust community. The tooling for IRC makes the experience more like an auditorium than a parlor. I'm optimistic about this announcement--if IRC has a future I believe it will be due to the social scale at which it is capable of operating.

<comment><USER19> Support over IRC is historical in open source.

irc.perl.org -- perl language support and development

irc.mozilla.org -- mozila related support and development

irc.freenode.net has many support channels:

#mysql

#postgresql

#vim

#emacs

#nodejs

#css

#javascript

#python

#manjaro -- manjaro linux distro

#archlinux -- arch linux distro

#freebsd

#linux

#vuejs -- horrible support (frontend channel)

#angularjs -- horrible support (frontend channel)

#elasticsearch

#sqlite

#xen

#docker

#git

and the list goes on. many great people there :)

<comment><USER20> #vuejs is created by Evan You. As a topic on the channel, he seems abandoned the channel and suggest people go to Gitter for active support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's good that they want to maintain and nourish the culture that has grown up around IRC, but in the long run, shouldn't the focus be on keeping the culture but moving it toward newer federated systems like Matrix? IRC is late 80's technology with no security.

<comment><USER22> Just because a protocol is old, doesn't mean you need to replace it. And newer stuff often is just a reiteration of the old stuff anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If I may interject.. Until 4 months ago I didn't know LTMH existed, but I knew I loved Freenode, and IRC in general. Since then I've learned much about LTMH, having been hired by them as a developer and designer. They have treated me very well so far, and I believe in my core that their interests are benevolent. They believe in protecting privacy, freedom of speech, openness of software, and connecting individuals from around the globe. In my experience, LTMH has never sacrificed these principles in the pursuit of financial gain, and I believe this endeavor (the IRC.com project) will, as all their other projects do, serve the community upon which they depend.

</comment><comment> crooked-v IRC will never get popular again. Server-based history and connections shared across devices are just too useful.

<comment><USER24> Not only that, but passionate IRC people still hold onto the belief that things like TLS are "useless"[1]

1\. [https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not- transitive...](https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive- or-why-irc-over-ssl-is-pointless)

<comment><USER25> Your link went dead. I would greatly appreciate actually being able to read this article.

<comment><USER26> You can find a working version at

[https://web.archive.org/web/20170629073046/https://www.quake...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170629073046/https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust- is-not-transitive-or-why-irc-over-ssl-is-pointless)

The argument is that there's no way to move the whole IRC ecosystem to use TLS (including with enforcement of certificate checks on the client side) and so the security benefits will be radically degraded by patchwork adoption, because if even one channel participant accepts a MITM attack, all channel participants' communications will be exposed.

This seems correct to me, but I still don't find it to be an argument against TLS on IRC, just an argument that security indications perhaps shouldn't be presented to users to confirm that their communications are secure since they do depend on behaviors of remote clients that the local user's client can't confirm easily. After all, suppose you're in a channel with only 3 or 4 people and all of them are enforcing certificate checks. Then you _have_ gotten lucky and received a tangible security improvement. Likewise for direct messages with one other user. But indeed, in the common case of a large heterogeneous IRC channel, probably there will most often be no security gain in practice against a powerful network adversary.

(And it's also a benefit for a user who's individually concerned about a nearby network adversary more than about pervasive monitoring.)

<comment><USER3> > in the common case of a large heterogeneous IRC channel

Which does not map all cases. Queries are still far from dead. And you don't want to set up a small IRCd for shady things because that might tick off law enforcement a lot more than sticking to some established network whose security you trust.

<comment><USER26> Yes, I tried to acknowledge this by writing "Likewise for direct messages with one other user". I think the author of the original anti-TLS piece was too focused on "the common case of a large heterogeneous IRC channel" to the exclusion of other cases, which I agree are very real!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> [https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org) is essentially a modern IRC, but federated and completely FOSS. I suggest people drawn to an IRC-like experience without the proprietary nature of Slack and Discord [give it a shot]([https://riot.im](https://riot.im)).

<comment><USER28> You know that IRC is FOSS as well right?

<comment><USER26> Maybe the intended contrast isn't between IRC and Matrix, but between Matrix and Slack (which a lot of people like to call "modern IRC" and which isn't FOSS).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Freenode already has channels like ##math, ##physics etc where lot of actual lecturers and professors lurk. I've gotten all my math help past few years over there as the quality of help is considerably better than the tutors on campus. So what does "IRC University" mean? Have accredited classes? Or just the same idea ?

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't know about trascended... But it definitely has gone backwards since.

But irc in its heyday had far higher quality and duration of connection than much that followed it. Maybe it was truly the first generation of the internet. I still have many of those teenage irc connections in my life years later.

It's not hard to imagine IRC surviving if it had a natural path to instant messaging when Icq/aim/yahoo arrived.

I welcome a return of a modern IRC.

<comment><USER31> I'm waiting on an NNTP revival.

<comment><USER30> Rss too

<comment><USER32> RSS was and is not dead.

<comment><USER30> Didn't mean to imply rss is dead. It's definitely not at the top of the pile where it should be either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I mean, IRC is still going pretty strong. I've used IRCCloud [0] for years and swear by it. IRC is still pretty much the universal chat protocol you can expect to find discussion forums for pretty much any subject, and not encumbered by centralized commercial systems like Slack or Discord (as much as I like them).

[0] [https://www.irccloud.com/](https://www.irccloud.com/)

</comment><comment><USER34> We should be pleased that someone actually wants to move irc forward and invest in it. I first discovered IRC in 1995 hanging out on #hackerzlair and later various Linux channels on EFnet. Without the countless hours on irssi inside GNU screen (yes, there was something before tmux!) I wouldn't be where I am today in my career. That said, we need to keep it distributed as much as possible; too few owners could be poisonous.

To my last point, I could easily see a second revival of irc using IPFS as the transport layer. Same feeling of community and privacy in a text terminal, but no central nodes.

<comment><USER35> Wait, there is something after screen?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> IRC should surpass the notion of just a protocol and become a real product. The UX is still not user friendly. There's no standard way of doing threads. Rolling out IRC in an organisation is extremely hard. Cloud-based IRC hosting providers are hardly credible and not endorsed by anyone as enterprise-ready. IRC Clients are offering drastically different level of experience, if even usable out-of-the-box. Authentication is hard (why do we have a hack like NICKSERV if that stuff should be in the protocol?). Offline message retention, history viewing, and seamless offline/online transitions are completely broken (Bouncer usually solves those with terrible UX).

Messaging is not easy. There are teams out there who are working on solving those hard problems full time while having the luxury of having a centralised specification with full control over implementation. IRC won't be ever be able to achieve that without transitioning into a centralised product.

There are reasons why going as centralised product is best. Twitter did the same (it was easy from the technical point of view, hard from community point of view). They managed to up their game in the user experience by doing so.

I'm not sure IRC can even do that at this point, the protocol is in the wild and making additions to it/standardising them, getting clients to adopt the changes would be hard. But it would be the only way for IRC to compete with other solutions.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'd love to see IRCv3 take off more:

[https://ircv3.net/irc/](https://ircv3.net/irc/)

I also want to understand web clients more, do they use WebSockets? Can we spec that out to be part of every IRC server out there?

<comment><USER38> Most use a websocket library like sockjs or socket.io which uses websockets and falls back to long polling if there's an issue with that.

Some IRC servers are starting to implement native websockets but that introduces several issues, so many networks use a websocket gateway to accept websockets to their network, such as [https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway](https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway)

Then for IRCv3, most clients these days do support their specs in some form of way, and it's growing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I love IRC. Use it every day. I'm developing my own chat stack though, which supports images, video, and audio changes as core features of it.

This is how an empty room looks like: [https://i.imgur.com/ir3qyUp.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ir3qyUp.jpg)

Code can be found in [https://github.com/madprops/Hue](https://github.com/madprops/Hue)

Been working on it since 2016

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't expect anything good to come out of this for the current IRC users. Hopefully they aren't going to play the embrace-extend-extinguish game in the long run to steal the name for their own proprietary protocol.

<comment><USER41> Remove "proprietary" and that's what IRCv3 did.

<comment><USER42> It's like the devs of Clang and GCC suddenly joined to define what "C20" means but bypassing ANSI and ISO processes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> A fair few open source projects mentioned there. If they can be keeping things open while truly helping the existing IRC projects then that would be cool.

</comment><comment><USER44> A friend introduced me to IRC around mid 90s when internet was getting popular in Sweden. DALnet was the network and it was late hours due to the channels main participants where from overseas. My friend went to the channels IRL get together in the US. Met there his love of his life, married and moved to the US. I think it's a great story about the impact of internet and IRC was and probably is.

Turning to today, I think IRC can be a big player in the area of IoT. Especially because internet is going into a period of decentralisation. It's starts with the geeks, like you and I, and later the main caucas will trend on.

Long Live IRC!

</comment><comment><USER45> This is a bit off topic, and I love IRC, but I'd love a modern IRC client.

Features I'd like:

\- Inline images and media

\- html preview

\- people list, friends, but also an automatic highlight system, when I chat with someone I don't know for some time, I'd like to have that person on some list.

\- Conversation history (a way to jump to my conversations within the channel history).

\- More advanced profiles (image, bio...) Option to publish my public channel list.

\- End to end encryption if in private channels

\- Notifications

\- Status (busy, helping...)

\- Activity summary (mostly for private channels but being able to know who was active, and what was discussed).

\- Reactions (on busy channels it is quite fun and a fun way to say thanks without pollution).

\- Threads.

<comment><USER38> (kiwiirc.com dev here) You might want to take a look at irccloud.com and kiwiirc.com/nextclient

These 2 clients cover most of your use case while others such as end to end encryption are currently being developed. Hopefully with with irc.com support multiple IRC clients can be reaching all of these features and in a standard open way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I like IRC but it's 2018 and even the latest drafts of ircv3 lack built in e2e encryption for private and group messages.

Using IRC is like using ftp or email. We've been there and tried that,slapping on a solution to secure it just won't work well. They've been trying to fix email for decades now and the best solutions we have(gpg and s/mime) still don't provide metadata security (I don't think their encryption can be callend end to end either)

In my opinion, a new _end to end encrypted_ protocol that preserves the properties of IRC people like would be ideal.

<comment><USER47> Isn't IRC compatible with e2e? I could see it working at a "transport" layer, with additional commands to import, export and view keys.

<comment><USER46> If you break backwards compatibility? Maybe to an extent. How do you handle clients that don't support it? How do you secure channels and allow some of the current server op/admin (what freenoders call staffer) functionality? By the time you consider that and more you might as well make a new protocol.

Let's say someone with an older irc client or who doesn't want e2e messages you,what then? Now your irc conversations become opportunistically secure. That means only arbitrary conversations are secure. Email does this and it sucks.

Another problem,clients that don't have e2e almost always also store logs in plain text. Yet another problem - no protocol level e2e plans as of yet.

So why try to fix it? This approach does not work. The least we can do is learn from history. Unlike email or ftp, there aren't a whole lot of people that depend on irc being the current irc protocol. What people want is a distributed server architecture with a user interface that is similar to the current irc. What protocol engineers seem to get wrong is that they use the opportunity to also add other fancy features which simply ends up working against adoption.

<comment><USER42> I can perfectly see this implemented without breaking backwards compatibility, similar to how we have usermodes for "connected via SSL" and channel modes for "requires SSL".

It doesn't require breaking backwards compatibility because, as far as outdated clients are concerned, they just "can't enter a channel because they lack a required usermode" or "can't send a message to some user because they lack a required usermode".

We only need the spec to define "some way" to do it so clients can announce their support and servers know what to do with the supporting clients.

Then it's up to IRC daemons to provide some modes for it.

<comment><USER46> Most of my comment was assuming it was implemented with or without backwards compatibility. You are assuming people will slowly move to the e2e version.

People are still writing clients without tls support. Why would you think e2e support will have better adaptability? People will move away from it when they get enough number of messages that require turning it off because the other party does not support it. Nobody wants to join your channel because you need them to have one of a few clients in a very short list in order to join.

We already have OTR (for quite some time now) and matrix has libolm - <USER2> aren't and won't change because the best you can practically implement it is using opportunistic negotiation and that is bad security. Best case scenario(imo),20 years from now 95%+ of irc users will use e2e. That is unacceptable when we already have fully e2e chat today. Let's break compatibility and have a separate network for the new secure protocol. At least that way people that move over don't have to look back. When foss projects move to the new network everything else (again,pure opinion) will follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I am part of a student association of GNU/Linux users in my university.

A long time ago many of the founders met on IRC, and after founding this association, they also founded a dedicated IRC channel.

This was nearly twenty years ago.

Time has passed, many new presidents and members have proposed new communication media (slack, zulip, mattermost among the many) and after some initial enthusiasm they all faded, their problems had become evident and their usage has dropped since.

Needless to say, that IRC channel remained. Despite everything.

</comment><comment><USER49> Oh man. The description of how IRC has impacted his life really hits me. I've been using IRC since I was in middle school, I've made and lost friends there, I've learned to program, I've helped others, I've grown as a person. It pains me to watch it fade as we move to platforms like reddit or discord.

[https://xkcd.com/1782/](https://xkcd.com/1782/)

</comment><comment><USER50> hmm... To me irc was great as a young teenager in the first half of the 90's because my friends were there. I used a lot of geographical local channels so at some point people started organizing dinners, and I ended up knowing a lot of people. I still love the concept of irc but people are gone and they are never coming back unless someone destroys fb, snapchat or whatever they are using right now.

</comment><comment> kuba-orlik For me the thing that IRC desperately needs is a set of features that would make it usable on mobile... While constantly switching networks (wifi, 3g etc) it's almost certain I will miss some of the messages. That is a real dealbreaker for me and the reason why we've decided to have an irc->telegram vridge so people can keep up with the conversation on the go.

Spoiler alert: now everybody just uses Telegram

<comment> cup-of-tea Back when I used IRC for work I always ran irssi on a server in screen and ssh'd in. I had a window that picked up any highlight that happened and, of course, logged everything.

I liked this solution. After a while people would understand that you are always idling and probably afk but that you _would_ pick up any messages as soon as you can.

Nowadays you could idle using a raspberry pi or something. It would use less power than your phone. I don't want IRC while I'm out. That's not the point of it.

<comment> jan-jakub Of course _I_ can do that - and I did, with znc on my vps. But it's not a solution for beginners or less-technical people.

Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members to read into the conversation history... Adding it to the spec would make it 1000x easier to onboard new users

<comment> cup-of-tea > But it's not a solution for beginners or less-technical people.

I don't see a problem. You don't give beginners enough credit. We were beginners once and we managed it just fine. If anything beginners today are cleverer than us :)

> Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new > members to read into the conversation history

Is this actually something people do? For one of my channels I had stats generated from the logs and ability to search the entire log. I'm sure that could be trivially setup nowadays with Elasticsearch or something. If you control the server you can guarantee you'll catch every message too and won't lose any in a netsplit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> My first experience with the internet was through IRC. I had read about IRC in a book I had gotten at a computer show in 1991. I had no idea what I was looking at but figured out how to join a channel. I chatted with someone from Indonesia! How cool was that. None of my friends could relate.

I continue to use IRC regularly. The Python community is thriving on Freenode and Rust community on Mozilla

</comment><comment><USER52> I love the optimism. Really.

However, while IRC is a great collaboration tool, and one I also grew up using, I find that though users are anonymous and no one can see each other, there are still plenty of trolls who have many ways of getting under one's skin.

This utopia of IRC simply doesn't exist. It is still comprised of humans. Anonymous humans. And anonymity tends to bring out the worst in people.

<comment><USER14> My experience with the FreeNode IRC network has been pretty troll-free.

They could do even better by requiring everyone to register.

In my experience, trolling on IRC is mostly a thing of the past.

<comment><USER53> > They could do even better by requiring everyone to register.

Many channels have this. For example, a lot of the GNU and FSF channels do this so we can keep them relatively spam and troll free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> irc is lively enough, steady and just right. Thanks but no thanks

<comment><USER55> I'm on irc still.. but i've cut down on all the channels I used to hang around in, and now I'm basically only in #motorcycles on EFNet, where IRC is alive and well. Topics range from rebuilding carburetors to the innards of Erlang.

<comment><USER56> Huh, I'll have to drop in. I didn't realize efnet had an active #motorcycles channel. I'm in one on freenode and one on snoonet, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Read the article, a bit skeptical, but we'll see.

P.S. I been registered on rizon since 2002 - who else is a an oldschool IRC user in here?

<comment><USER58> EFnet was my first favorite network... haven't used that network in years though... #warez950 I think was one of the channels...

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I used to _live_ on IRC, but it's been years since I was a regular user. Are channel takeovers still a thing? That was one of the things that turned me off on it after getting locked out of the channel I called home for most of a decade.

<comment><USER60> No, channel admins register their channel to a bot (ChanServ) with special privileges over the network, so the bot can never be taken over.

I've been using IRC for about a decade, and almost all networks I have seen have such a bot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> IRC revival? What do people think Slack, Hipchat, Discord, Stride, etc. are? They're IRC derivatives. I spent my formative years online in IRC rooms so for me I feel like the "revival" has been going on for years.

</comment><comment><USER62> Long time user of IRC and I never ever heard of irc.com till now. What is it for and what does it do???

I have been saddened to see the state of IRC declining year after year. I love the fact someone is trying to do something about it!

</comment><comment><USER63> IRC proves that having a barrier to entry can be a beautiful thing in some cases.

I hang about in an IRC channel with less than 10 active users, still more valuable than any Slack channel I lurk in with hundreds.

</comment><comment><USER64> Who cares about the domain. Don't need a fancy .com for a revival.

</comment><comment><USER65> not sure it need a revival. i have been using irc since 99

</comment><comment><USER46> Isn't london trust media the owner of freenode and privateinternetaccess?

<comment><USER38> Yup! [https://londontrustmedia.com/](https://londontrustmedia.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Revival? I did not know IRC was dead. I am still using it every day.

</comment><comment><USER67> How can you revive something that never died? :>

</comment><comment><USER68> Fediverse has a better shot than this.

</comment><comment><USER69> The biggest problem, and biggest fail of IRC. It is too low level and requires people to write scripts when they need anything else beyond simple text message.

I am torn apart here, because I really do like hacking things. The issue is - most people don't. They just want to use it, and they want to use it consistently - no matter the platform, the client, the server they are connecting to. And I totally understand that. More of it, I also understand that if you fail to provide this consistency your service have failed in the design phase and will never get widespread usage.

The sooner we, tech savvy people, understand that, the sooner we'll be able to deliver a successful open services that actually stand a chance with their closed counterpart.

So obviously, give people way to hack, but you must to:

* Design a rich protocol covering needs of the biggest target possible while allowing optionally disable features. Channels history, disappearing messages, embedded media, text formatting, emoji, stickers, web hooks, API for bots, you name it. The protocol must cover most of them, so there is no need to write scripts anymore, unless you need something niche.

* Design a strict spec for the clients, so all of them must keep to the spec, or they fail to be part of the service. And this is critical - do no allow client to behave differently and have a missing features.

* Design clients so they are trivial to use. They must be usable out of box and all (most) of the features must be enabled after installation. Necessary steps to start using it (connection, channels, etc.) should be reduced to minimum and intuitive.

* Keep a community of server and client developers so they can share info and be able to build uniform solution for the users.

* And probably most important - promote the service. And do promote it heavily, unless you want to design something niche, which, I guess, is not what we are talking here.

I've used IRC for years in the past. It was great, I do admit - not anymore. Today I require at least few formatting options (bold, inline code, block code) and no 3rd party tools needed to get anything else work properly. I have no time to hack things I need to use. I would rather spend my time to hack things I like. IRC is just a tool to communicate, I want to use it, not hack it. I loathe to jump here and there to accomplish tasks that should be done within a second with one click.

The biggest problem I observe with many things in the industry is - made by devs for devs. Never for average Joe. Average Joe have no idea about keeping your session attached so you don't loose nick, logs, etc. Neither he cares about that stuff. And honestly - the older I get, the less time I have for this kind of stuff as well. Just make it work or face the failure.

</comment><comment><USER70> Meh. I'm still waiting for the triumphant return of the pets.com puppet.

</comment><comment><USER71> Please no ircoin.

</comment><comment><USER19> Long live IRC

There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great.

IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it.

IRC is open.

The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful

Email, IRC, HTML, FTP

And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different from the newer trendier platforms. Back then people used to engage a lot more before they became curios to put a face on a nickname.

The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX. Looks like average people need apps that are simpler to use than IRC, apps that allow them to promote their profile to the next level, have followers and likes statistic. Which is alright, in the end they are just the average people that wont put effort to learn nonclickable platforms like IRC.

The web really exploded when the smartphone came and apps like facebook came also and made the average people go online and understand what internet was for. There was a time when only the nerds understood what internet really was. Nowadays the internet guy is not a "nerd" anymore. Nerd is not perjorative as it once was.

IRC is still open, IRC is still kicking.

If you are on IRC, dont let the shiny and newer take you out from IRC.

Long live IRC

<comment><USER72> I used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the 1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively- centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator clients that can't even show an image.

I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either.

I guess that makes me "average".

IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s era of protocol design. All are on their way out, some more gradually than others. Good riddance. How sad it would be if the Internet of 2020 looked the same as it did in 1995.

<comment><USER73> I don't think people want IRC for the lack of functionality. I think they miss IRC because they see in Slack a real threat to decentralization, privacy and openness.

I don't use IRC. But I'd never use Slack either in a project I maintain/lead. We need a better alternative.

<comment><USER74> Also, slack is like a dumbed down version of IRC. As an example, on IRC you could run an auction or a 10000 person university lecture because there is a +m channel mode (moderation).

+m quiets all users in the channel and only allows you to speak if you receive the channel-user mode +v (voice) or have +o (operator status). Some ircds also have a +h etc.

You can setup bots like "RaiseYourHand" for people who want to ask questions and need temporary voice (+v).

Try that on slack, telegram, signal, etc. Its impossible.

IRC was ACTUALLY built for collaboration and communication. Slack was built to make money.

The difference in goals causes a different outcome.

<comment><USER75> Actually, Discord does this pretty well. I honestly consider it a 21st century successor to IRC. The unfortunate fact is that Discord is still a closed system, with not even the ability to run your own instance, instead with the owners insisting on a cloud-run infrastructure.

Just imagine how much better Discord, Slack, et al. could be if you could host your own instances with your own rules and with your own extensions.

<comment><USER76> If it is closed (and nominally 'free' for the average user), you have to assume _everything_ you say and do is being mined and sold to the highest bidder. How can something like that be the successor to anything?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> "IRC is a transcended level of humanity"

Just how high are these folks on their own supply?

<comment><USER78> It's not that far out of line with the status quo:

"Indeed, to assess WeWork by conventional metrics is to miss the point, according to [Chief Executive Officer Adam] Neumann. WeWork isn't really a real estate company. It's a state of consciousness, he argues, a generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs."

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-27/wework- ac...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-27/wework-accounts-for- consciousness)

<comment><USER79> We are always told by marketing types that what we perceive isn't real; instead, it's always something at least one level above that. Purely designed to manipulate an emotional response from the reader/viewer.

I can say for me it certainly does cause an emotional response, but not the one WeWork or London Trust Media are hoping for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Let IRC die. Shit protocol, horrible usability.

</comment><comment><USER81> I just launched [https://superthread.net](https://superthread.net) the other day. It basically replaces IRC with a modern tech stack. Sorry for self promotion, but it's a bit strange that someone else is having the same idea at the same time.

<comment><USER57> [https://spectrum.chat](https://spectrum.chat) is also very similar! I love the minimalist approach tho!</comment></comment>


How big company CEOs spend their time in work - github-cat http://www.pixelstech.us/article/1471107279-How-big-company-CEOs-spend-their-time-in-work <comment><AUTHOR> Okay article concept, but full of hearsay. And no references.</comment>


Some harsh realities of being an entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/the-11-harsh-realities-of-being-an-entrepreneur/

<comment><USER2> _This post originally appeared at OnStartups, where all my writing appears exclusively._

You know you're old when: you still remember when the term "exclusive" actually meant something.

Edit: on closer inspection, this version is actually truncated, so he sort-of has a point.

</comment><comment><USER3> Full article link: [http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/17741/The-11-Harsh- Real...](http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/17741/The-11-Harsh-Realities-Of- Being-An-Entrepreneur.aspx)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed - sorry - didn't think to do that. _Mea Culpa_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OT: Jason, the top navigation panel's CSS on your blog seems messed up (in both Firefox and Chrome) : <http://skitch.com/hrishimittal/rabki/jlb>

It's nothing major, but people might start doubting the publication revolution you're bringing on :-P

<comment><USER5> His custom fonts are not loading... potential typekit fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> He forgot one:

Even if you work hard, have lots of promising ideas, and are very persistent, the odds are still against you (at least in terms having a big payoff that frees you from ever having to work again). But you will probably make a living for yourself and have lots of interesting experiences, and that's worth something.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a tangent, but the giant fixed black header on that site is awful. It covers the text, and the giant navigation links extend beyond the header even, distracting even more from the content.

What bothers me most about it is that it consists of navigation links and a search box-- elements that are meant to _take me away_ from what I'm currently trying to read. If you're going to go the effort of writing things you want me to read, why would you then shove something in my face that distracts me and tries to pull me away from it.

/rant--sorry.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you can't handle the harsh realities than you are not ready to be an entrepreneur. It's the ability of an entrepreneur to not quit when things are down, to inspire others that are ready to give up, and to continue to lead through times of failure and success.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd find the article more pleasant to read if your "continue reading" link jumped to the same part of the article on the other site. It's annoying having to scroll around looking for the place to start reading</comment>


Distributed Open House the day after Startup School - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/aoh11.html

<comment><AUTHOR> People had been asking if we'd be doing this again. Yes! Sorry for the late notice; this year I have to read applications and prepare for Startup School at the same time. (I think I will try to avoid that in the future.)

<comment><USER2> All good pg, we know you're busy and we appreciate it.

Personally I'm planning on dropping by Scribd and maybe Greplin if I have time. I'm hoping it'll be a bit more intimate than the craziness I expect at Airbnb and Dropbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you are around for the weekend, please also feel free to join WePay for its annual Halloween Party this Friday, October 28th. RSVP here: <https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=289782027698784>

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm assuming this is open to everyone? Or is it only open to people who received invites to Startup School?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Come to Heyzap to meet us and other great mobile hackers.

We are going to have burritos being made on demand and potentially a web luminary or two (or just me)

</comment><comment><USER6> Man I already booked a flight that leaves around noon! This would have been a great experience. Oh well, I will have to suffice with the other festivities.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's a map, in case it's useful to anyone else: [https://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=21148616822...](https://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=211486168223052544979.0004b0857e5e02293817b)

</comment><comment><USER8> Out of curiosity, what purpose does this kind of a session serve?

<comment><USER9> From hosting/attending open houses for the past 2 years, we've seen:

networking, hiring, advice, socializing/drinking, partying

If you like hanging out with smart people, the open house is the place to be.</comment></comment>


Ghost for Journalism - <AUTHOR> https://ghost.org/journalism/ <comment><USER2> I moved my blog to Ghost a couple years ago and I've been happy with the change. It is notable for not getting in my way. I feel like Ghost enables my writing more than anything else, and it's a really quick platform. Quick to draft, quick to publish, quick to load, etc. It used to be pretty feature- bare, but as they've added in features (which has been great), Ghost has stayed more or less an enabler of my writing and not gotten in my way. I'm excited to see what this program brings to the platform.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm intrigued by whether Ghost can pull off moving into the longform content space, since just a little while back Medium published that post about cutting back on their efforts.

<comment><USER4> Medium and Ghost have two different goals, AFAIK. I'd say they I see Ghost closer to the Wordpress ethos. For media companies lack of control over look and feel in Medium has been a friction point, I think Ghost offers a lot more flexibility in that sense, but I haven't check ghost or ghost.org recently, tbh.

Not sure Medium is cutting back on efforts, though, as much as they are trying for a new business model that doesn't rely so much on advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ghost uses bookshelf as its ORM, which is becoming a less and less maintained project every month. ORM is a vast part of its core, it's not easy to replace that. I'm beginning to worry about its future.

<comment><USER6> I don't know what the status of Bookshelf is but I do note that there are still regular contributions to the project.

As a rule Ghost tries to have write permission to core dependencies including bookshelf so there is no danger of it or any other package threatening the future of the project.

Besides, the beauty of an open source stack is there's always the ability to fork - worse comes to worst.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As long as it doesn't work on OpenBSD it's a no-go for me.

I have considered using static-site generators but honestly I _love_ the user interfaces of blogging platforms like ghost.

I use svbtle for now though, until I find something that I can actually run on my servers.

<comment><USER8> Sounds fine to me...

[https://blog.cagedmonster.net/deploy-ghost-blogging- platform...](https://blog.cagedmonster.net/deploy-ghost-blogging-platform- under-openbsd-6-0-with-nginx/)

<comment><USER7> I read the same blog when I had issues, and I've had it on more than one openbsd machine 5.9 and 6.0

        phobos :: ~/Ghost »  npm install --production
        npm WARN prefer global firstname.lastname@example.com should be installed with -g
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/amperize requires image-size@'0.5.0' but will load
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/image-size,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 0.5.1
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/ghost-gql requires lodash@'3.10.1' but will load
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/lodash,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 4.17.4
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/knex-migrator requires bluebird@'3.4.6' but will load
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/bluebird,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 3.4.7
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/knex-migrator requires debug@'2.2.0' but will load
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/debug,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 2.6.0
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/amperize/node_modules/nock/node_modules/chai/node_modules/deep-eql requires type-detect@'0.1.1' but will load
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/amperize/node_modules/nock/node_modules/chai/node_modules/type-detect,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 1.0.0
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/brute-knex/node_modules/ghost-ignition requires debug@'2.2.0' but will load
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/debug,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 2.6.0
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/brute-knex/node_modules/ghost-ignition requires prettyjson@'1.1.3' but will load
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/prettyjson,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 1.2.1
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/ghost-editor/node_modules/ember-cli-babel/node_modules/broccoli-babel-transpiler/node_modules/babel-core requires
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/bluebird,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 3.4.7
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/ghost-editor/node_modules/ember-cli-babel/node_modules/broccoli-babel-transpiler/node_modules/babel-core requires
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/lodash,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 4.17.4
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/passport-ghost/node_modules/ghost-ignition requires debug@'2.2.0' but will load
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/debug,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 2.6.0
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/passport-ghost/node_modules/ghost-ignition requires prettyjson@'1.1.3' but will load
        npm WARN unmet dependency /home/dijit/Ghost/node_modules/prettyjson,
        npm WARN unmet dependency which is version 1.2.1

<comment><USER9> I tested in a clean VM running OpenBSD 6.0, worked fine for me, see my sibling comment at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13428005](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13428005) for what I did step by step.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for this, I must be doing something stupid then. I owe you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: CC Search – search engine for 300M CC-licensed images - <AUTHOR> https://search.creativecommons.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm Director of Engineering at Creative Commons and part of the team that is working on CC Search.

We've been working on the product for over a year and we are just out of beta today! One of CC's goals is to encourage the use and remixing of CC-licensed content, and we hope that CC Search will help make that content more discoverable. The current version is very much an MVP and only searches images, but we plan to add more content types in the future and index the ~1.4 billion works out there under a CC license. We would love any feedback you might have.

Also, CC Search, the associated API, and the scripts we use to index data are all open-source and developed completely openly. Our sprints and roadmap are public and we welcome contributions from the community.

 _Relevant links:_

CC Search code: [https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog- frontend/](https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog-frontend/)

CC Catalog API code: [https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog- api/](https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog-api/)

CC Catalog code: [https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog/](https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog/)

2019 Vision: [https://creativecommons.org/2019/03/19/cc- search/](https://creativecommons.org/2019/03/19/cc-search/)

Roadmap: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/19yH2V5K4nzWgEXaZhkzD1egz...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/19yH2V5K4nzWgEXaZhkzD1egzrRayyDdxlzxZOTCm_pc/)

Active sprint: [https://github.com/orgs/creativecommons/projects/7](https://github.com/orgs/creativecommons/projects/7)

Backlog: [https://github.com/orgs/creativecommons/projects/10](https://github.com/orgs/creativecommons/projects/10)

How to contribute to CC projects: [https://creativecommons.github.io/contributing- code/](https://creativecommons.github.io/contributing-code/)

<comment><USER2> If I put images in the internet, how can I tell your search about them/about the license?

<comment><AUTHOR> We plan to implement an API for users to submit CC-licensed works that they'd like to add to our database later this year. Once we have that, you can call our API when you publish a new CC-licensed work and we'll automatically add it to our catalog. We have to work out some details like how we can verify that the content is actually CC-licensed.

Encouraging use of ccREL embedding like aldenpage mentioned in another response is also in our long-term vision since that would require no additional actions from the creators.

<comment><USER3> You could have the same (only existing?) process than other content platforms like YouTube, Github, etc. In practice, most people are fair and post the content with the right license, but anyone can send a DMCA request.

An annual transparency report is probably mandatory with that process, like these ones :

[https://github.blog/2019-01-23-2018-transparency- report/](https://github.blog/2019-01-23-2018-transparency-report/)

[https://transparency.facebook.com](https://transparency.facebook.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, are there any checks run on these images to see if they really are CC?

This search result for 'satellites' is a screenshot of a google maps result, which includes the copyright information for the imagery within the CC image [see the bottom right attribution text in the imagery].

How can that really be in CC?

[https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/3f0eddb0-55b4-46e0...](https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/3f0eddb0-55b4-46e0-ba91-4be614e71520)

How could we be sure that the images themselves are genuinely licensed rather than someone copying it from another source and slapping on the licence?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do our best to verify the license but cannot 100% guarantee that the image is CC-licensed. We have custom scripts that we use to ingest content from each content provider. For Flickr, we use their API which contains license information for each work. If you click through to the source image, you can see that the user who uploaded the image did license it under CC BY-SA 2.0.

We don't yet have a way of dealing with content where the user incorrectly licensed it, I think we could add a "report image" function that would help us identify and remove this type of content. There's a disclaimer if you scroll down that says "Verify at the source: Flickr" with an explanation of why we can't guarantee the license, maybe we should make that more prominent.

<comment><USER5> Maybe the Flickr user did buy a license from Google for that particular screenshot that allowed them to publish it as CC BY-SA. How would you verify this? What's the legal situation here? Can Google sue me when I use that image, or do they have to sue the Flickr user?

<comment><USER6> Google can sue you, you can in turn probably sue whoever "gave" you the image and said it was licensed CC BY-SA. Just like you can't keep a stolen item that somebody sold you for cash, you're not free from liability when you're publishing an image you didn't have rights to. You'll always need to apply judgement before publishing, and I'd do a reverse image search at the very least.

<comment><USER7> But, in general if you inadvertently buy an item that was stolen; on eBay, say; then you wouldn't be prosecuted for it, you just would lose ownership.

In the parallel situation here the 'selling' company [CC search] is saying "this isn't stolen", and you're using it in good faith. Seems like your liability _should_ be zero. If CC_search also did due diligence then their liability should probably be zero too.

Media mega-corps probably see things differently so I imagine their copyright laws mightn't be as liberal.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's a civil issue, I don't think anybody would try to jail somebody. You will be in breach of license, so the rights holder won't care why you're violating copyright, only that you do. I don't know of any judicial system where "good faith" is applied to civil suits (i.e. you eating my food thinking it was yours gets you out of buying me a new plate).

Similar to the hypothetical ebay case: you're going to be asked to reimburse the owner (or return his property), you collecting from the seller is a different story.

<comment><USER8> Would be interesting if moving forward, when a user wants to take an image they know they will likely share as CC, they could tap a button to turn on 'CC tagging' such that the camera app applies a digital signaure to the image. Perhaps then, at least some image sources could be validated as being intentionally released under CC by operator of the image source at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Definitely appreciate the programmatic access, but in terms of straight search results it's very hard to improve on Google Image Search with the Usage Rights filter.. Info: [https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/29508?p=ws_image...](https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/29508?p=ws_images_usagerights&hl=en)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! A big chunk of our upcoming work is going to be towards improving search relevance. We also plan to add content types other than images this year, starting with open textbooks and audio, so that will differentiate us.

<comment><USER9> That would be fantastic. Also like to +1 the reverse image search support, finding CC images visually similar to a restricted license image would be really cool feature that Google does not seem to support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thank You for doing this. I hope one day we will see a similar search for CC licensed music where you can search based on license type, and e.g. music style, beats per minute, length, audio format,...

I was recently trying to find music for a side project and searching for CC licensed music appears to have gone from somewhat onerous to very in sites like Jamendo.com, free music archive, etc. This is off topic but if someone can point to a website with CC licensed music where it's possible to search based on license type (e.g. BY-NC-SA) I would love to know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! We plan to add audio to CC Search later this year (probably in Q4). We will have searching by license type built in from the beginning and those all sound like great filters to add.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A related blog post is [https://creativecommons.org/2019/04/30/cc-search- images/](https://creativecommons.org/2019/04/30/cc-search-images/).

(Via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19791801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19791801), which we merged into this thread.)

</comment><comment><USER12> Remember that for commercial use you still need a model release in the USA when faces are identifiable. It is totally separate from the licensing of the image.

<comment><USER7> What's the relevant USC for that please?

<comment><USER12> Don't know what you mean by USC

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I arbitrarily searched for "hula hoop" and most of the top images have people in them. People using this facility to find images to freely use would be advised to avoid images of recognizable people, because you don't know if they signed model releases or consent to being a part of your web site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We will figure out if there is a way to communicate this better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Excellent job. Thanks for all the hard work.

A few usability issues. 1/ Doesn't work without javascript. and 2/ At screen resolution 800x600 the search field gets completely hidden. Shown bellow.

[https://imgur.com/a/bPkdOoT](https://imgur.com/a/bPkdOoT)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to me how many images are lost when you filter by "right to modify". I wonder if "CC-SA" should be the default licence, ie should be what "CC" means.

Similarly if the default CC license were "NC" then I imagine many more shared images would be excluded from commercial use.

My suggestion is that people probably wouldn't mind modification of their CC images as a default.

I usually use CC-BY-SA.

Edit: looking afresh at the CC license material it appears my understanding of the licenses is weak (eg see look down-thread), that the default does allow modification. Which makes it weirder that people would go out there way to specify that their pretty poor quality images could only be used as-is add not modified.

<comment><USER15> I've always wondered: what does "modification" include? Is resizing modification? Cropping? If I slap some text on the raw image, would that be constituted as modification as well?

<comment><USER7> [https://creativecommons.org/faq/#when-is-my-use- considered-a...](https://creativecommons.org/faq/#when-is-my-use-considered- an-adaptation) might help somewhat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are _a lot_ of CC licensed images coming up through Flickr search that are nowhere to be found in CC Search and since the vast majority of CC Search's images come from Flickr, you would be better off just searching on Flickr...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We are working with Flickr to ensure that we are able to index all their CC-licensed images; currently there's an issue with their API that hides some images. It should be resolved by the end of the summer.

We have images from a lot of other collections, such as the Met, Rijksmuseum, Behance, Thingiverse etc. Flickr has more images than any of them by a couple of orders of magnitude, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Definitely my favorite: [https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/9988a06f-c7d1-466d...](https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/9988a06f-c7d1-466d-bd73-ad6817da075b)

Thank you for this.

<comment><USER18> creepy

<comment><USER19> Even more creepy is the related images for that link. None of them are related in any way shape or form to it or eachother.

<comment><USER20> Actually they are. They are all "awkward."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice, I have been mostly using bing as search engine for public domain // CC0 images and it worked reasonable well but a search engine specialized on this area is something which is very useful. What I immediately noticed is that when you search for something including "icon" it shows lots of images of religious icons which make sense in a way but it probably not was most people want if they search for "fireball icon" or "mail icon" or "car icon".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! A big chunk of our upcoming work will focus on improving search results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Pretty neat! Another great resource is the 53 million or so files on Wikimedia Commons — [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/) — which don't appear to be searched by this. Commons has plenty of material that is PD, so I suppose that is technically out of scope, but it also restricts licenses to CC-BY or CC-BY-SA whereas some of these are NC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Wikimedia Commons is our next big priority. We do also index PD content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there a search API available or would it be against the terms to access the site programmatically?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have an API available, although we're not encouraging use of it until we build a few more features in.

Docs: [https://api.creativecommons.engineering/](https://api.creativecommons.engineering/)

Terms of Service: [https://api.creativecommons.engineering/terms_of_service.htm...](https://api.creativecommons.engineering/terms_of_service.html)

Code: [https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog- api/](https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog-api/)

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is always nice to have search engines for free stuff. I have minor gripes with the engine.

\- Browser navigation doesn't work. Going back doesnt take you to your previous search query.

\- Search seems to be solely keyword based? And keywords are kind of hit and miss on many images.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, we'll add browser navigation to our list of things to fix. Our search is still pretty naive, a big chunk of our upcoming work will be focused on improving results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is cool and it is great that the software is all open source, but randomly clicking around it does seem that an awful lot of images all come from Flickr, with the images even being hosted by Flickr. It seems to me the interface could make the source more clear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! We don't host any of the images, we link people directly to the source. Flickr does have orders of magnitude more images than other providers. We will add making the source more prominent to our list of issues to fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is great. Is this all CC0 or do some of the images have conditions?

My wishlist would include also including videos and music/audio and an API to access it. I'm sure that's a big ask though.

<comment><AUTHOR> All content is not CC0, we index content shared under all CC licenses and public domain. You can filter by license or usage rights.

Adding audio is planned for Q4. Video will likely be in 2020. We already have an API, although we're not encouraging use of it until we build a few more features in.

Docs: [https://api.creativecommons.engineering/](https://api.creativecommons.engineering/)

Code: [https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog- api/](https://github.com/creativecommons/cccatalog-api/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd remove the unnecessary animations when loading the images.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! This is on our list to do soon, we've had other complaints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Neat... though searching on "F-14" returned a lot of yoga images instead of the naval fighter (searching "F14" returned what I was looking for).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Currently the search query parsing is pretty naive and some search terms work far better than others. A big chunk of our work over the next few months is going to be focused on improving search relevance.

<comment><USER29> have you considered using something like the reCaptcha approach, where you have users classify/improve results?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I did a search for Flamingo and there were no flamingos...

</comment><comment><USER31> Unsplash has 0,95M, and CC Search 300M. Love this. No more flickr search for when I needed to find CC photos. <3

Thanks for much for your work @kgodey and to your team.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks like its currently experience the hug. Unless a search for 'cat' returning no results is expected behavior.

<comment><USER33> > Looks like its currently experience the hug.

Same thing happened to me (no results) and that was my initial thought but, in my case, I had forgotten to check uMatrix. Some vital CDNs and subdomains were allowed but uMatrix was blocking api.creativecommons.engineering

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Where is it claimed there 300M photos? Would love a source before claiming that in my design slack channel

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the official blog post: [https://creativecommons.org/2019/04/30/cc- search-images/](https://creativecommons.org/2019/04/30/cc-search-images/)

I've also seen the database :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is awesome. I wonder how long til Google implements a similar filter..

<comment><USER36> They already have it. You can choose your required "usage rights" in the advanced search settings page(atleast for images)

<comment><USER35> Cool! Didn't see it in mobile but did see the "Labeled for Reuse" filter option

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Tried searching for penis and was impressed by the variety of SFW results

<comment><USER7> There doesn't appear to be a visible "sfw" flag in the search interface, but I did your search and searched "vulva" and got barely any photos of human anatomy. That seemed unusual somehow, is there an active nsfw filter in place?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have any filtering on our end but all the sites that we index data from have content policies. For example, we only index public images from Flickr which automatically excludes mature content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I am very pleased with the quantity of cats any given search returns.

You may proceed.

</comment><comment><USER39> I had no idea this even existed. That's really cool.

</comment><comment><USER40> Blank page with JS disabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We're going to be working on improving accessibility next month and will address this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> @kgodey: Your default HTML source code includes CC icons loaded from creativecommons.org. That is a problem:

1\. It results in tracking and could violate the GDPR and other data privacy laws.

2\. It is third-party content and might get blocked by ad / content blockers.

I suggest to offer a default HTML source code without CC icons.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback chmars! CC Search is hosted at search.creativecommons.org so assets loaded from creativecommons.org should not count as third-party content or tracking. Let me know if I'm missing something.</comment></comment>