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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

On IRC you just take the discussion to another channel, which can be created ad-hoc and trivially disposed of when no longer necessary. Or you just become good at reading around multiple conversations at once. There's also no expectation that you need to read everything to catch up when you come back after a while - take that to email if you need to.

Much better real time chat culture, imo.

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To be fair, that same trivial disposed chat concept you mentioned lives in Slack, as well. It's incredibly easy to quickly make a group DM chat from a channel.

> "There's also no expectation that you need to read everything to catch up when you come back after a while - take that to email if you need to."

Slack doesn't require that expectation, either. You can easily change settings of Slack to just ignore messages that you were not there for, just like you are describing.

While I actually do like IRC also, your two points are pretty weak considering Slack does both of those well, too.

I'm not saying Slack doesn't have the features to support this. I think that the addition of threads are a response to a lack of this culture.

I use Slack exactly like I'm using IRC. There is no universal culture.

I think for me the problem is that the answer to a question may come much later than the question and other conversation might have taken place since. Certainly is the case with our remote team. (that said, I can't get the post to load, so I have no idea if this will help or hurt)

Happens all the time, not a problem. On IRC most people direct mentions somewhere - mention them and it'll show up in their notifications when they come online. They'll mention you in their response and show up in your notifications, too. No one having any other conversations is generally bothered by another conversation happening a few lines at a time every few hours.

Isn't the whole point of Slack to reduce friction and make teamwork easier? The name is Slack after all :)

IRC in it's heyday was alright but I think Discord has replaced it's function. The last few encounters I have had with IRC have been negative because of the "in-group" being unwelcoming.

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