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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

It's just crazy to many of us that a reinvented IRC is suddenly "not dead" and in vogue again. Not unbelievable, just kind of surprising how quickly text chat on a channel format was cloned, rebranded, and valued for billions.

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Slack didn't clone text chat. They took the best parts of text chat, Facebook (reactions), Reddit (threads, edits) and terminals (simple UI for applications) and merged them into a single tool. I'm currently using HipChat and the difference is night and day. Slack makes large, busy chat rooms coherent in a way that just isn't possible with other text chats. And because of that, it opens new completely new possibilities (channels to support customers, channels to use as long-term references, etc.)

> Reddit (threads, edits)

I haven't used Slack since 2016 so I don't know if it's changed, but the threads were such a disappointment when they came out. I suppose everyone was hoping for some similar threading that Flowdock has, but Slack threads simply just hide the discussion.

I agree that Slack beats HipChat and IRC for work communication, but that's about it. I prefer even the new Google Chat over it, and that definitely has warts of it's own.

Yeah threads still suck. They claim they've investigated it and it was the best solution but I totally get lost with twenty threads over five Slacks with ten channels each.

IMO the small changes they've made have really helped. I like how they keep off topic conversations from overflowing into the channel, and the little notification about unread threads helps me not forget them. Plus you can go back to conversations you missed and add to them.

I get the impression that threads (like browser tabs) are a very individual thing.

Some people want total threading, others want a flat flow.

Slack seem to be treading a very careful line between the two extremes

That was a great ad for Slack, but I don't think it's true. I've never had any issues with any other chat app. Many people still use Facebook chat and IRC and the functionality is basically identical between each of the new chat apps (well, except you can do way more with IRC).

I want to respectfully challenge this - many people do still use those tools and still will. But the user experience in Slack is objectively better, especially with large rooms with frequent content (as the OP mentions).

I lived in IRC in the late 90s and early 2000s. IRC is fantastic and open and federated. But if I want to get things done with a team, I'll pick Slack everytime.

Still, it is not worth $16B. It's straight forward existing ideas crowbarred into a modern webapp that really any 10-headed team of highly talented web programmers could come up with and implement within a month or so. So it is maybe worth 10 * $100 000 / 12 = $83 333, so it is overvalued by a factor of 192 000. Highly indicative of an economic bubble.

> a modern webapp that really any 10-headed team of highly talented web programmers could come up with and implement within a month or so

infamous dropbox comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I know, valuation in tech is most often about reach, not so much about the technology itself. This raises the important question whether anything should be allowed to have as much reach.

Objectively better than the garbage the GP mentioned but objectively worse than Telegram.

After using Telegram for work at my previous job, switching to slack now with a new company is jarring. Their absolute dogshit electron apps constantly hog system resources and take forever to load. Also Telegram is free and has a far better audio and video chat and again, free...

I find it mind boggling companies pay for chat. Both discord and Telegram provide all the same features, incl bots and do so for free, what gives?

I haven't used Telegram much, but as far as I can tell, Telegram has almost none of the features I pointed out as the core strengths of Slack.

Lowly Skype does just about everything Slack does. Though, they added "channels" after Slack.

After months of trying, I still haven't figured out how to have two coherent support conversations in the same public room/channel at the same time outside of using Slack.

If you know how to do this, please share.

I can't say that I'm a fan of Slack, but in a sense, what they did to IRC (and associated tools like logging bouncers) is what Dropbox did to rsync. Take something that works for people willing to give it time and effort, centralize it, make it a bit flashier and minimize setup to make it accessible to more people.

The user experience for both these tools haven't been great for me, but streamlining them for casual computer users evidently has a lot of commercial value.

This is the point. People keep saying "it is just IRC" but the thing they forget is it is IRC+ with practically no setup. If you want Enterprise or consumer adoption, you must make it easy. Just like what you said with Dropbox. Install client, data automatically available everywhere I log in. That is the product and it actually solves a problem people have.

However, as we have already seen Dropbox has already been commoditized and is looking for a reboot. I see the same thing happening with Slack. It will be the king for a while but it has no moat.

I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat, and not in a nerd sense of "well Dropbox could be replaced with rsync, a VPS and some shell scripts, m'glayven". I never understood how they killed Hipchat, IRC, or anything else. I don't know if they have a strategy to deal with things like Microsoft Teams that is very attractive to companies who already work with Office 365/Active Directory or if they can really do anything about it. So, I congratulate them on their success but I, too, am utterly mystified.

I believe hipchat was a paid product, which stunted it's growth compared to Slack. Slack is 'free by default' but converts users to paid.

> I never understood what Slack did better than Hipchat

Stay up? I was at a company that was on Hipchat, and we really liked it, but the amount of downtime got to be semi-unbearable. We switched to Slack and it had much better uptime.

Hipchat had service issues at the same time Slack was getting momentum. It was terrible timing for HipChat.

One thing that can’t hurt is that Stewart Butterfield is well connected, and got all his friends to push Slack at their startups.

I was at a startup, we used a mix of Hipchat (business types) and IRC (developers). A marketing/social media guy who was buddies with Stewart joined and insisted we should all switch to this, and there we were, dogfooding Slack (this was closed beta days).

Hard to beat free user acquisition.

Back when Slack came out, my company was using HipChat. It was okay, but clearly outdated and not great -- barely a step up from AOL Messenger. I was invited into a Slack by some former colleagues, and it was a breath of fresh air. Someone finally upgraded the chat UI to something modern and un-clunky. It didn't hurt that it had a web UI, that it was free, and that it had configurable integrations that could work right inside the channel. Another thing that I think helped it take off was the simplicity with which it handled embedded media. Post a YouTube video or a tweet or a GIF, and the thing came alive on your screen, embedded right in the channel. You shouldn't underestimate the power of GIF sharing.

There was nothing groundbreaking about Slack, and there still isn't. There are a lot of naysayers on HN scoffing at Slack for basically being a worse form of IRC, which is silly and wrong, but also right in that there is nothing groundbreaking about the tech. But products don't need to be groundbreaking to win. They just need to be better than the rest, and perhaps generate the necessary "reality distortion field" that convinces people that it's the next natural evolutionary step. Once you convince people of that, they don't go back to HipChat.

Slack and IRC are incomparable. Slack has authentication, message retention and search, multimedia attachments, mobile application with notifications, conversation threads, etc.

You could try and cobble together something similar from an IRC server plus ten different programs, but most companie would rather pay Slack a wee amount than maintain a Frankenstein's monster.

Except for message retention and search, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible with bouncers.

Mobile applications with notifications, conversation threads with +draft/reply (IRCv3 draft), multimedia attachments (IRCv3 idea), authentication with SASL and standardized account management (IRCv3 draft), etc.

Look at what IRCCloud provides, and what IRCv3 is doing.

> Except for ##2 killer features##, IRC already has all that, and even that is possible ##if you implement it yourself##.

That's what normal people see when they read your message.

Going to irccloud.com, creating an account, and connecting is "implementing it yourself" how again? And IRCCloud has all that in a single solution.

Even if you want to self-host, there are solutions — get any server, run

    docker run \
  -v /path/to/folder/where/you/want/to/store/the/config:/config \
  k8r.eu/justjanne/quassel-docker:v0.13.1

and connect with quassel or quasseldroid to that server (the setup wizard guides you through everything else). It's about as simple as it can get for selfhosted. (Quassel gets you message retention and search immediately, and the other features are already being worked on).

Well, irccloud.com must be doing something wrong if they're using a pre-existing protocol, have solved its problems and yet Slack is the company worth billions.

That’s the part where VC money comes in. 99% of the VC funded companies worth billions weren’t the first, or the best — they just managed to get VC money and out-spent everyone else on advertising, or used the money to give away their product until they were the largest.

Uber is still making losses in almost all markets it’s active in. Slack is making a 380'000 $ loss per day. Amazon hasn’t made a profit a single time in their entire history.

The Silicon Valley model of "let’s gain a monopoly by giving away a product and outspending everyone on advertising, then monetizing it" doesn’t reward the best product. Never has, never will.

And companies grown the traditional, honest way, making actual profits of course can’t compete with that. If I opened up a supermarket giving away everything for free, of course I’d have more customers than the supermarkets who have to make money.

Amazon has made a tiny profit for several years before AWS, when it started having larger ones.

But it was never too much in the red. It shouldn't be placed together with Uber.

"Except for message retention and search"

Hipchat has terrible scalability problems and poor uptime.

Hipchat was horrible. Barely worked. Flaky. Was happy when my company switched to Slack

Productization - The act of modifying something, such as a concept or a tool, to make it suitable as a commercial product.

Making big money requires productization. Sleek UI and interface that the end users see, plus marketing and selling.

Even when someone is the first with tech and prioritization, it does not mean they succeed in the long term after the field matures. I don't have high hopes for Slack in 5-10 years. Neither do I see Dropbox or Netflix justifying current valuations in the same time period.

Slack is not just reinvented IRC, just as Dropbox is not just reinvented rsync and Docker is not just reinvented cgroups.

If the basic tech behind those products met the needs of business users by itself, these companies would never have succeeded.

It's not about just the technology. It's about wrapping that technology in a good user experience for end users and an easy management experience for business customers. That is really difficult, and Slack deserves credit for doing it so well.

My cofounder at gliph was convinced of the same and I do not blame him for it. We were in the heart of secure messaging / starting group chat when we ran out of money pursuing a marketplace. Justin Roiland even hosted his official Rick and Morty group chat with us.

I think to many highly technical people Slack is a “reinvented” irc. But I was ok IRC stealing mp3s from bots in the 90s. And I’m on Usenet now.

Slack is nothing like IRC.

That just shows how much IRC is worth.

IRC is just a protocol, it’s a bit like saying Facebook shows how much HTTP is worth.

Your comment made me smirk, but on second thought, it actually does!

Yeah, you have to consider more than just the technical aspect

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