Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want. You could use a pretty eye candy client, or then not. With the web, however, it's an impossible feat to implement a standards compliant browser.
IRC is objectively terrible. If you ask a question, the only way to get the answer is if you stay logged in until someone answers you. That's like buying a phone that doesn't ring unless you're already holding it up to your ear, or an email client that deletes all your email unless you happen to be looking at your inbox at the moment a new message arrives.
What makes IRC good is that it's a text-only chat with a wide range of highly configurable, blazing fast clients. Not supporting images, quoting or reactions could be considered a feature, since these distract from the actual conversation at hand (consider newbies clogging the conversation with screenshots, or 100 people adding reaction emojis to a message).
Scrollback and voicemail can be useful, but a good chunk of the population does not want either, hence unread backscroll and unconfigured/full voicemail boxes being very common.
The largest Freenode channels I'm on like #node.js and #javascript have about 10 regulars max, myself included. It's pretty much dead for any purpose other than hanging out with a handful of curmudgeons feeding off a corpse out of habit.
Doesn't seem like "a good chunk" to me. IRC lacks the only feature I really care about in a chat network: new people to talk to, users.
I wonder how many HNers who praise IRC only like the idea of it but don't even use it these days, either.
And I haven't even heard HNers bring up usenet outside of downloading free shit so I know that's especially dead wrt this thread as a decentralized Reddit.
So it always makes me chuckle to see "yeah, well, some people like it like that!" which is apparently virtually nobody. Or it's like how my two friends and I loved the failed, abandoned supermall in my hometown because the three of us could longboard down its parking garage.
These two words next to each other really bother me. That something is "terrible" is not objective, whatever that means. All we have are our subjective valuations.
You might have a preference for one over another, or each might be appropriate for different situations. But to claim one is objectively terrible is ridiculous and only makes you look like you haven't taken the time to understand it at its most basic level, or you're too solipsistic to be able to recognize the existence of value in something outside of your own preference.
The UX in slack is not easily replicated in IRC (for example, how does/can global search work in IRC?)
Therefore, it is actually correct to say IRC is objectively worse in those measures. The only measure that IRC beats slack is the open protocol (which, if I'm being honest, not many users care,ala most existing chat services moved to private protocols and haven't lost all their users to IRC or xmpp).
Well it's a good thing Slack and Discord don't work exactly the same way but with a nicer UI and no need for a bouncer to emulate a persistent session.
IRC was all about conversation. You went there to have a conversation, like a party line voice bridge. You even waited around for someone to have a conversation with... oh I miss it...
Boomers demand attention constantly.
Oh and binaries didn't go away, that's a feature and you just don't have to sync alt.bin.* if you want to avoid. I think it's great though for snatching rare/out of print stuff.
(There wasn't anything back in the '90s in the design of email to stop spammers from spamming, either; but enough people cared enough about email that billions were spent to add that spam-proofing. Nobody cared enough about Usenet to invest a similar amount, so it's still as unprotected as it was when Monica Lewinsky was in the news.)
> "Anyways, ideally you would be able to connect to services with whichever client you want."
Make it happen. This is my other point. People complain that all these fantastic legacy technologies aren't used but nobody puts in the work to modernize and use them. If it was that simple, where are all the companies doing it?