As someone who likes email and irc...
What’s the point of slack? What’s the appeal? Honest question!
What’s the point of slack? What’s the appeal? Honest question!
* File sharing's pretty dang good.
* Client supports tons of bells & whistles like inline file preview. And emoji and anigifs and all that stuff which, love them or hate them, most people love.
* Pretty good multi-device notification.
* Pretty good notification settings that, set anywhere, work seamlessly with the above on all your devices.
* The client(s) may be janky thanks to the underlying tech, but the design is rarely janky-feeling.
* Search that's not half bad.
* Pretty good interface for ad-hoc private 1 on 1 or multiparty rooms.
* You can sign your org up online for free to try it out and have all the above, no configuring anything, no setting up bouncers, no persistent daemons per user on any server anywhere. No server at all, for you. Just a web form, and you're off to the races.
* Tons of 3rd party integrations with setup processes often little more complicated than the original Slack signup, if even that hard. Pointy, clicky, maybe a copy-paste, and you're getting Jira notifications in a channel (ugh).
[EDIT] deleted a duplicate bullet point.
I have ran my own private IRC server before and frankly, it's a pain. There are lots of solutions to common problems (like using IRC bouncers) but it is just complicated enough to make products like Slack a superior user experience.
It is pretty easy to get grandma up and running on Slack. It is much more difficult to get her to use IRC.