Hacker News Reader

Comment by spdustin | Hacker News Reader

Respectfully, I disagree. In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. I'm a smart guy, have managed (and continue to manage) many, many UNIX-based services, and have run several IRC daemons in my life.

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.

View on HN

I don't think you're going to find evidence for the argument that IRC is more popular than Slack. IRC's user base is declining, Slack's is growing, and the numbers we have now suggest that Slack is already much more popular.

But back before the WWW saw non-trivial deployment, IRC was the #1 use of bandwidth on the internet! Something from the 90's must still be true today!

I was surprised when I read this comment. Do you have any evidence for this? If I had to pick some protocols off the top of my head I would have thought nntp, smtp, ftp, but certainly not irc.

I assume that he'd be talking about the IRC DCC sub-protocol.

CTCP and then SEND bots?

Slack has 1.1 million users _total_ (http://www.fastcompany.com/3047819/with-over-1-million-users...), meanwhile Twitch uses IRC, and has ~3.3 million per day alone (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/29/twitchs-viewers-reach...), using stats taken eleven months ago while more than doubling its monthly viewer numbers every year.

Freenode isn't the only network out there =)

Being powered by IRC is not the same as using it, in the sense meant here.

What do you mean? Every viewer also connects to their IRC chat, hence "using" it. Heck, I personally connect to it using my IRC client.

The discussion is about users who use IRC directly and consciously. Many of Twitch's users have no clue what IRC is. Imagine a new social app that used SMTP in its implementation. You wouldn't bring it up in a discussion about the popularity of email.

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."

> The discussion is about users who use IRC directly and consciously.

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're all IRC users inadvertently. That doesn't add to IRC's popularity. If Twitch disabled IRC and switched its chatrooms to some ghetto socket.io app, most of its users wouldn't know.

> 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.

Again, your definition of popularity is different than mine, but either way my post still refutes his point about the declining userbase.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Agreed, although I believe the end goal of my comment was that after leaving the store, the term "Android" is completely forgotten, whereas "Apple" is almost a household term because you see them everywhere in pop culture—movies, the news, in schools, etc.

Try "IRC's mindshare is declining". rather than "IRC's popularity is declining".

Agreed, that would have been a far better term if that was the meaning he was attempting to portray.

>> Of course they're all IRC users inadvertently. That doesn't add to IRC's popularity. If Twitch disabled IRC and switched its chatrooms to some ghetto socket.io app, most of its users wouldn't know.

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.

If a proprietary IRC network that is managed as basically an API layer for a service that isn't primarily about chat is the primary tentpole for a platform...

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.

Android is built on top of Linux, is it reasonable to say that the popularity of Android phones mean that Linux is popular?

I don't know if it is reasonable, but that's what is always said. The primary argument for Linux popularity is always "Android!".

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.

Of course! And by digging deeper, we can also establish that cellphones are popular, and that electronics are also popular. It's going the other way (away from generality) which lessens popularity, since you're targeting something _more_ specific.

I think that's the problem with IRC. The idea of decentralized IRC networks means that channels are scattered amongst multiple IRC networks. IRC is already not as usable as Slack, and to have multiple networks decreases usability even further. I love IRC, but I see why Slack is full of win.

But decentralized is the best thing ever!

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.

Centralized is generally easier to implement a given feature in, so it's easier to support more features.

It's also harder to base a business atop decentralized network, and when building a new network there is less of a business case in spending the extra time, stress and expertise to make it decentralized (vs. centralized).

Let's state explicitly why it's harder to base a business atop a decentralized network - because a business makes money by creating friction in the service, and in a decentralized model a friction too strong will be routed around.

Well, I think it depends on whether you are talking about decentralized networks, as I read the parent to your comment to mean, or decentralized ownership/administration of networks, as I read your comment to mean.

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.

But that brings us back to mbillie and "if <x> were so great, everyone would already use/do <x>". Does popularity necessarily imply superiority? Adoption just means it's easy for anyone to get aboard. But that doesn't mean it's implicitly good, in any other way. Worse is better works, for example, if one option is more approachable than the other. Decentralization is good, as a rule of the thumb. Not having everyone on the same network, but having the ability to set up your own network or service based on the technology, is a good thing. Why would you want to have everyone on the same network? Networks are often topic-related. For example Freenode for programming-related topics. Minecraft is pretty focused on EsperNet. Quakenet used to be the place to online gaming. This is usefull and good, since communities sort themselves by interest, views, tools or what have you, by default. So why not encourage self-sustainability through means of decentralization?

Centralization is being driven by a lot of things, not least of which is that decentralization is really really hard. But a lot of it comes from mobile -- the idea behind decentralized apps before mobile came along was that bandwidth was not very dear -- oh, sure, it was limited in the days when IRC first became popular, but there was no reason to leave any of it unused. Local compute power was the same -- you may not have had a lot of it, but there was no reason to leave what you had sitting idle. Mobile is different. Idle CPU power can mean the CPU is throttled down to save on power and heat dissipation. Instead of staying connected to a server at all times, use "push" notifications so the server can let you know when it's worth using battery power and metered data to talk to the server.

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.

It's also worth noting that it's not clear what decentralization brings to the table from the perspective any single organization. Most organizations will want a central authority for the history of their group communications.

Such facilities are bolted onto IRC, but never truly integrate with it the way other solutions have offered.

EFnet is a single entity in the exact same way that Slack is. All channels belong to only their service. Introducing yet another chat service only adds another place to the list. https://xkcd.com/927

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.

The military uses IRC.

Yes they do. Check out ##security on Freenode. I also do some security stuff in ##GRC

Fair enough, and to my credit, I said I was guessing about the popularity of IRC vs Slack. And I wasn't defending IRC; I am a Slack user, and by choice. A quick search showed me that public IRC servers had ~503,000 daily active users last week, while Slack recently had over one million daily active users. I would further guess that the IRC users are more likely to have made that a choice versus the Slack users, who are more likely to have signed in to Slack because that's what their workplace uses, making IRC the more popular "choice" rather than the more popular "service", but that'd be more conjecture on my part, and in any case, my argument remains unchanged: popularity can in fact be a signal that something is better/easier for those that use a device or app or service. Examples to the contrary (BetaMax vs VHS, HD DVD vs Blu Ray, 8-track vs cassette) are interesting from an argumentative point of view (I really wanted HD DVD to win, FWIW), but that's just it: there will always be evidence to the contrary.

It doesn't make it a logical fallacy to say something is popular because it's superior for its audience.

> In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given 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.

This is like saying Apple products are popular because Apple has a great marketing team, as opposed to because said products are genuinely easier to use (they "just work") than their alternatives.

Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not...

But that is why Apple is so popular. They are a marketing monster! They sell a "lifestyle" and they do it extremely well. They tell you to "Think Different" (as long as it means buying an apple product). They tell you one button is easy and the best. They tell people what to think and (some) people think that.

Yet they spend less on marketing then most major tech companies. One could just argue they spend their marketing budget well, but you have to wonder.

Less as a percentage of gross income, or less in total dollars?

Both. Apple is infamous for its anemic marketing budgets; e.g.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/apples-advertising-budget...

They spend just maintenance level. Tech press and media does the marketing for them.

Apple products got good because of large amount of investment, not because they were popular. If IRC tech got the investment slack has now, it would only get better.

It worked for Nike and De Beers.

The entire sports drink industry.

The supplement industry.

Sadly, a lot of people (generally die-hard nerd types) genuinely believe that marketing was the sole reason for the iPhone's meteoric rise in 2007. They don't place any importance on user experience and therefore can't tell the difference between the iPhone and the early-gen smartphone predecessors (Palm/Nokia/etc).

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.

To be fair, (as a Slack user) I'm not sure off-hand what Slack has that couldn't have been done on top of IRC. Almost everything could have been done with an IRC Server + Backend Services + Fancy Client model.

Problem: "Backend services" - how many of the Slack integrations don't have public APIs and Slack was only able to do it by being a single company? Good luck convincing people to set up the API keys for all of those services.

Why can't Slack run irc servers on their own equipment? The "integrations" would just be IRC bots running on private Slack servers, no?

> (they "just work")

Please don't say that Apple products "just work". We've got an office full of them.

and I need to "put a USB keybord, take it out again" when suddenly my Mac keyboard and trackpad stop responding xD

I'd rather have "easier to debug when it doesn't work" than "just works, most of the times"

Yes, it's pretty much self-evident truth. "Genuinely easier to use", even if it was clear-cut thing, doesn't explain the levels of popularity Apple products have. Lifestyle branding does.

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.

Buying 'the brand' can also lead to much more documentation which can make the 10% change in price worth while.

It seems very unfair to the thousands of people who have donated time, money, and services to IRC over its life span to dismiss it as not having gotten value.

You misunderstood. I am saying IRC would be as easy as slack if the slack team spent the time working on IRC. Their investors would never let them even if they wanted to.

It is not an obscure fact that investing shitton of money in marketing will yield better adoption than investing the same money in the product. People "who have donated time, money, and services to IRC over its life span" generally focused on the technical side.

I'm thinking a huge part of the difference between Slack and IRC audiences has to do with the $340MM Slack has raised. If someone gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, the differences might not be so obvious.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't companies usually get a quarter billion dollars AFTER they have shown traction?

They got $17.5MM in the four years prior to even launching.

If you gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, we'd have the world's most complex ncurses UI, and a security ACL system whose complexity would rival X509. And normal people would still use Slack, because Slack was able to make simple design decisions that benefit the overwhelming majority of users but piss off Unix nerds like us.

don't be naive, IRC was the simplest solution to a problem 25~ years ago, now systems have changed and things must be thrown away.

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)

1. But isn't that sort of the point? IRC as an ecosystem has had years to get its act together. Like many corners of the tech ecosystem, perverse incentives have frozen IRC's progress. The very things that Slack, Hipchat and others have exploited are the things the old guard IRC users love. Opacity, terminal interfaces and a total lack of accountability are exactly what many IRC users find alluring.

2. Using cloud services in exchange for contributing to aggregate data seems like a pretty clear understanding of personal value.

Giving "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars isn't a good idea. Giving it to a company making a single IRC client, on the other hand, would probably result in something like Slack, only much better.

I'm not sure how you conclude it would be better. I suspect you'd end up with something approaching Slack, only without interoperability with the rest of the IRC ecosystem.

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.

How do we even measure the value that had been donated to various irc technical efforts over the last 26 years? Millions if dollars in person-hours is probably not unfair to imagine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com