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Mailing list rebranded as Slack channels with a pretty UI similar to Slack is what it looks like to me. Is there a market for that, I am sure there is for people who are not familiar with mailing lists and prefer a web app interface similar to Slack for their mailing lists.

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Slack is essentially IRC rebranded with a pretty UI, so I'd say yes.

Rebrand anything with a pretty UI and someone in an "office job" will want to use it...

There are some pretty critical differences from IRC:

- history (this is probably the biggest)

- in-line replies

- 3rd party integrations

- gif/photos/files

It's funny to see 3rd party integrations listed when IRC was barely more than telnet and was stupid simple to interact with programmatically. I wrote my first IRC bot, from zero knowledge to functioning in the channel, in 45 minutes. Try to do THAT with the Slack Integrations API or whatever. And that was when I was still learning how to code!

Slack's webhook integration is super easy I got my bot up and running in a minute.

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