Comment by mi100hael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mi100hael | Hacker News Reader

There's a perfect alternative:

* Free

* Handles thousands of users seamlessly

* Archived via bot same as free Slack

* No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes

* Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from

* Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities

It's called IRC.

Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these days. In the past, a suggestion to use IRC would have been downvoted to hell and back!

A lot of people seem hung up on the history, file sharing, or some other feature that Slack has, so I thought I'd take a moment to expand on my ideal setup and how they translate from Slack:

* Long-lived documentation and important team knowledge: Wiki pages (which I prefer even when using Slack and pins or history search are available). Full history of edits is visible and it's easy to access/search.

* Discussions involving a large number of stakeholders: Email. Threads and the async nature of the protocol make it well-suited to discussions when users aren't all online at the same time and the discussion is more thoughtful and isn't moving quickly. Slack threads suck replies aren't very visible and history scrolls quickly in active channels.

* Discussions involving outages, current tasks, and other immediate needs: IRC. It's real time, cross-platform, etc. History can be archived for later searching, but CHAT HISOTRY != DOCUMENTATION. Post-mortems and that sort of thing should end up in a wiki or similar.

* File sharing can be done via some other service with a link pasted into chat. One extra step to paste the link manually isn't a big deal.

There are drawbacks, though:

* no built-in file uploads

* a bot is required for archiving

* a bot is required for notifications

* no native scrollback/history - IRC bouncers solve this problem, but it's not a plausible solution for most non-techies

* the last two issues also mean that mobile solutions are going to be lacking.

It's possible to have IRC as fully featured as slack, but it does mean either rolling your own solution, or using a lot of other software to accommodate everything and everyone.

Why not just email?

Email implies a different sort of latency.

If I want to ask my coworker René for a quick bit of knowledge, a phone call is too disruptive and too urgent, and an email might not be answered for a few hours. Slack/hipchat/irc are the perfect medium for "hey, do you know off the top of your head why X is Y?"

Sometimes I fail to answer slack messages for a good chunk of time, with email I only have to pay attention to one notification and can handle all communication from the same interface (and you have to use email anyway). I don't think there is anything inherently slow about email, or that firing off one without a carefully crafted subject would be bad manners. Might be a personal preference, nevertheless I don't think there is any technical advantage in using an instant messaging service.

* file uploads in your chat client are misplaced at best, and "rich" environments with formatting and images are 99.999% distractions

* channel services can provide archiving and notifications.

* scrollback can be handled by a bouncer, yes, but it's up to the IT dept to set it up per-user

* there are plenty of usable irc clients for mobile, web, and desktop to satisfy this need.

source: Started using telegram/slack but productivity went down so work launched an internal ircd (inspircd). Internal wiki, git, and sharepoint for documentation/files/code where it belongs. Not the chat client.

> * file uploads in your chat client are misplaced at best, and "rich" environments with formatting and images are 99.999% distractions

Nope. They're extremely useful. Just offhand I can think of tons of times we've (a) pasted metric graphs, (b) pasted annotated screengrabs, (c) pasted snippets of code, (d) pasted snippets of test output. None of this is easy in IRC.

But once they're pasted in there, they can only be used there. It's barely harder to upload a file to any myriad of file sharing/hosting services and paste a link which most graphical IRC clients can be configured to auto-expand (and users who don't care/don't want a bunch of images can choose to handle links differently)

I want the text snippets to be shown inline. I'm fine with Slack owning the image assets, because I don't have to worry about permissions the way I would if I uploaded them somewhere else (unless it was to some other internal tool).

I've been on IRC since 1993, and I'm an accomplished programmer. I still find setting up and configuring ZNC and an IRC client complicated, error-error prone, and confusing. And it doesn't always work - sometimes it quits working for no reason and I have to restart things.

In particular, there are many settings that mention security, encryption, and certificates. It's unclear what combinations are sensible, supported, or necessary.

fwiw, I use bip rather than znc.

> file uploads in your chat client are misplaced at best, and "rich" environments with formatting and images are 99.999% distractions

We can agree to disagree, but I think that the wide adoption of things like Slack and Hipchat are strong indicators that most people side with me.

What sort of productivity problems did y'all have? Because I have a hard and fast rule - if someone tries to introduce a giphy bot into a channel, I will throw a full-blown tantrum and abuse it until it's gone.

I do agree with you wholeheartedly that Slack, etc., are not a place for documentation.

Life of the party here!

What's the problem with giphy? Is it too silly? Too much light hearted humor going on in your team's chat?

> Too much light hearted humor going on in your team's chat?

We have an off-topic room for light-hearted humor, and it generally gets more traffic than any of the work related channels!

> What's the problem with giphy? Is it too silly?

It's usually too irrelevant. Someone tries to do "/giphy smile", and the result is something that's not actually someone smiling. So they try again. And again. And then it's just people playing giggle roulette, without any actual content. Even off-topic, humor rooms need a decent signal to noise ratio.

IRCCloud solves a lot of these problems and you'd think there's a market opportunity for them to step in and offer their enhanced IRC experiences to "teams" and "communities" with an appropriately optimized fee structure.

Matrix[1] solves some of these issues, notably the archiving and native scrollback, and has a working IRC gateway. We're experimenting with it at our IRC network now.

1. http://matrix.org/

Can you name your IRC network and elaborate on how you are planning to integrate Matrix into it?

It's a shame there has not been an easy, free way to solve the major problems with IRC for everybody:

- no history while you are not in a channel

- lack of modern features like sending images and lack of good UX

- no mobile notifications

Matrix.org solves these problems very well IMO, but it's adoption is abysmal too.

All of these problems are solvable, though:

- Commonly addressed with logging bots and a link to the log in the topic

- Some clients have this: when you drag an image into Glowing Bear (a web frontend for WeeChat that I'm working on), it gets uploaded to imgur and a link to the image is pasted in the channel. It can also display images and videos inline if you wish.

- Easily handled with services like push{over,bullet}

The problem is that these things don't work out of the box and that there's a learning curve. It's just not a very friendly experience for newcomers.

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