I'd just like to point out that this argument ("if <x> were so great, everyone would already use/do <x>") is just a slightly different form of the ancient appeal to popularity argument and is entirely fallacious.
I still use Slack for internal use, and for our students.
What makes Slack (and its ilk, though the title of the post makes a bias against Slack clear) so great is that it's simple, easy, full-featured and has a low barrier to entry to the non-HN crowd that is being asked, in many cases, to use it.
I can promise you, out of experience and out of just plain statistics, that Slack and IRC have different audiences, and those audiences will not likely prefer the other.
Also, I'd guess that IRC is actually the more popular choice. But the majority of the IRC using audience is too busy getting work done in IRC to comment on an HN post.
CTCP and then SEND bots?
Freenode isn't the only network out there =)
No one denies IRC's continued popularity as a protocol for broadcasting text over a network. Slack itself uses it. But it's dying out as measured by the number of people who say to their colleagues e.g. "get on IRC, I have something to tell you."
From the parent post I replied to, "IRC's user base is declining". Every single person watching a Twitch stream is an IRC user, whether they know it or not.
How do you determine the popularity of something? How many people use it.
Android is extremely popular. Do most of the folks realize they're using an Android phone? Nope.
Does it mean Android isn't popular? Nope.
If you don't have a similar understanding, we'll have to agree to disagree.
> The point is more that it's dying out as measured by people who say to their colleagues e.g. "jump on IRC, I've got something to tell you."
Of course they wouldn't, you're already speaking with them. Slack is fine for trusted networks of peers (businesses), but not much else. I won't start chatting with any my friends using it, nor would I bother to sign up somewhere to get access to a random Slack channel/community instead of using IRC, where I also coincidentally wouldn't need any of Slack's features.
> Of course they wouldn't, you're already speaking with them. Slack is fine for trusted networks of peers (businesses), but not much else. I won't start chatting with any my friends using it, nor would I bother to sign up somewhere to get access to a random Slack channel/community instead of using IRC, where I also coincidentally wouldn't need any of Slack's features.
No, what I meant was, people no longer think of IRC as the tool to use to talk about projects and communities. They used to. That was its primary use case. That use case is shrinking, so IRC is becoming less popular.
> How do you determine the popularity of something? How many people use it. Android is extremely popular. Do most of the folks realize they're using an Android phone? Nope.
This isn't quite true, is it? Most Android users seem to know they're using Android. I could be wrong.
> No, what I meant was, people no longer think of IRC as the tool to use to talk about projects and communities. They used to. That was its primary use case. That use case is shrinking, so IRC is becoming less popular.
There's plenty of other avenues to use these days, so the numbers have diluted, absolutely. EDIT: There was no social media, very few IM clients... But the channels I'm in have been steadily rising (Freenode). http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/irc-002....
Quakenet took a huge drop once it stopped being used to find CS matches.
> This isn't quite true, is it? Most Android users seem to know they're using Android. I could be wrong.
Obviously this is going to be anecdotal, but with the ~20 people I know who aren't technologically savvy, they'd only be able to tell you if they're using an Apple phone or not. My mother, for instance, has no clue that she's using a Windows phone. EDIT: I guess that really goes to show something about the success of Apple's marketing.
I think this has quite a bit to do with what class of phone they buy. Android is marketed very heavily in certain contexts when buying a phone, just as iPhone is. Walk into Best Buy and ask for help on buying a smartphone that isn't basic and Android or iPhone (or Windows phone even) will be part of the pitch. Similar to how if you buy a sports car you are probably going to know something about the engine, if not when going into it, you probably will by the time the salesman is done. If you are buying a commuter car, they may or may not distinguish the engine, and you may or may not care enough to remember.
Saying if Twitch disabled IRC is like saying if Slack changed to an IRC core..., which is not meaningful when discussing how many users Slack and IRC have. Twitch has several millions of users of influence. If they didn't use IRC, IRC would have millions fewer users, yet, Twitch chose IRC. Some of Twitch is IRC, and some of IRC is now Twitch, and millions of people use Twitch consciously. Twitch is the IRC client.
That doesn't seem like a really fantastic outcome for IRC. I guess if you're looking to come up with a conclusion that IRC has more users it is a useful tool. If you're looking to see what the future of distributed and local FOSS and corporate software team communication is? Less so.
Also, in this context I think it's pretty relevant. My personal opinion is that if Slack was just an IRC client instead of having its own propertiary backend, it would have been a better product.
I hate that argument. If decentralized was so great, then it'd be more popular, but it's not. More and more centralized stuff is exploding in popularity.
That is, the network can be decentralized but still administered by a single business entity, in which case you theoretically get a network more robust to outages, or the network can be composed of many separate entities, in which case you are theoretically protected from the bad behavior of any one administering entity, since there are many others (as in your example).
The other reason it may be harder to build a business atop a decentralized network is that the costs associated extra hardware, software, and locations and troubleshooting required to achieve the gains of a decentralized network may outweigh the gains achieved by doing so.
Decentralized systems, and peer-to-peer systems, and even centralized systems designed around computers designed to sit next to a wall outlet and draw power from a practically unlimited source are all being replaced by systems that are more centralized and better equipped to talk to mobile. AOL Instant Messenger is dying because it was built around an older paradigm and, at least last time I bothered to try it, is an incredible battery drain on Android devices. Newer messenger apps that are built mobile first or at least make mobile an equal partner to PCs are winning instead. And it's the same for group chat -- IRC is built for old-fashioned PCs, Slack is built with mobile in mind.
Such facilities are bolted onto IRC, but never truly integrate with it the way other solutions have offered.
It's also nice that I don't have to signup anywhere to use most IRC servers.
Don't get me wrong—Slack is the perfect tool for businesses, but not for much else.
It doesn't make it a logical fallacy to say something is popular because it's superior for its audience.
Which is the horse and which is the cart? Slack is easy because it got resources to be easy. Those same resource could have invested time to make IRC just as easy.
There is no inherent reason why IRC cannot be just as simple.
The reason slack is popular is because it got pushed hard and lots of money went into making it easy and popular.
There is nothing inherent about IRC that would have prevented it to be just as easy as slack if the same resources were put for that work.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/apples-advertising-budget...
The entire sports drink industry.
The supplement industry.
These are the same people that are now confused as to why Slack has risen in popularity despite the existence of IRC, which (in their eyes) is technically superior.
Please don't say that Apple products "just work". We've got an office full of them.
I'd rather have "easier to debug when it doesn't work" than "just works, most of the times"
It reminds me of Raspberry Pi. There are lots of more powerful boards that you can buy cheaper, but people still mostly buy RPi because it is the brand.
that's just the nature of the beast, x.509 is also very old- but old things should be fixed or replaced with better alternatives, slack just fixes a usability problem.. but trades all privacy and freedom for that.
Personally it's not enough, but google has a massive market share because normal people do not consider that their data or freedom has any worth.
at least google is pro-free market in the way that you can extract data out later and migrate, I don't see slack being able to offer that reasonably. (or their incentive to allow it)
2. Using cloud services in exchange for contributing to aggregate data seems like a pretty clear understanding of personal value.
The stuff IrcCloud, Slack and HipChat undo? That's the stuff that seems to be alluring to the steadfast IRC users. Inscrutable commands, nick and chanserv and unencrypted passwords sent via a command that could very easily be typo'd to broadcast in a channel, obscure partitioning behavior that is very much not what most businesses want, a lack of accountability or verifiability, a lack of robust logging and search...
I say these in a negative way, because that's my perspective. For many people they'd list many of these in positive ways like, "improved anonymity", "off the record by default", "network robustness", etc.
Whatever gave you the impression I think this is causal?
Similarly here, you could argue that the popularity argument is stronger because the tools are relatively easy to switch between and people are constantly re-evaluating this choice as new projects are created. Lock in and other switching costs bolster the concern of relying on popularity, but those don't come into play very strongly here.
Why does gchat, snapchat, whatsapp, fb messenger exist if AIM had been fulfilling the need of the market?
gchat & fb messenger are backed by huge companies trying to sew up the communications of a large community for the purposes of selling marketing services. The need they were created to fill is a corporate need, not a popular one.
Whatsapp was primarily popular because it made it cheap to text on your phone. I don't know the history of snapchat, never used it.
Anyway, it's all hypothetical. We don't have a free market with all participants being well-informed.