Comment by ceocoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceocoder | Hacker News Reader

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I see this IRC argument come up quite a bit every time Slack or like thereof are mentioned, especially on HN because - you know hackers, quite a few of us used IRC and still have a bit of nostalgia about it. However, please consider this as a thought experiment - how many of your family members, co-workers (especially people from non tech/non STEM backgrounds) were able to successfully use IRC or you used IRC to communicate with. When we had IRC server at my current job before we switched to Slack, it was an insular club of engineers with a high bar of entry - you need to know how to setup clients and create alts if you wanted to use on multiple devices and know decent amount about IRC to use IRC. Now contrast that with Slack, it is used across Sojern by 100% of our team - commercial, marketing, product, c-staff, and engineering alike. UX is designed to get out of your way and make it easy to communicate rather than act as a "filter" or "bar" or "must be this haxx0r to use", in addition my family has a slack workspace we use for various things and that includes - again the least technical member of my family - my mom, who is a Pharmacist but not the most tech savvy - she has zero issues using Slack.

It is easy to dismiss something as "just a chat product" but then again, it is incredibly hard to make a product that is so easy to use that everyone can use. Reminds me of that comment about Dropbox from years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

MSN Messenger. AIM. Yahoo Messenger. Skype. GChat. iChat. etc. There was a whole list of extremely popular chat products that were used by people who wouldn’t even have been able to log into Slack with the level of computer literacy they had at the time.

Personally, I think what happened was that GChat became popular, and killed all the alternatives, and then basically stagnated and confused the shit out of its users through hangouts etc.

Slack was one of the first products that realized that since GChat had gone, there was a huge gap in the market.

I’m hard pressed to think of any area where they were beyond predecessors in either ease of use or features (I can’t remember if persistent chat rooms were available in all the other messengers) beyond those little custom emoji things.

I started on IRC not too long after it was invented, and I saw, even in the terminal days, lots of "regular" people use it, once SLIP and PPP became popular, things like mIRC made it pretty easy for most people. Microsoft even made comic chat for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat But open systems got overtaken by walled gardens.

>an insular club of engineers with a high bar of entry

and all the teenagers in all the high-schools who otherwise had no affinity with computers whatsoever.

/slap

But that was 20 years ago, of course. You can't compare the technical prowess of a random kid back then with a current well-paid software professional with access to portable hardware 100s of times more powerful.

Not everyone who works in a major corporation are tech literate, nor do they want to be. IRC is not a great program for those folks who have such simple requests as "save my history and show it as I switch devices" (due to then requiring a bouncer, etc.)

There's a reason Mozilla moved away from IRC, and it wasn't that "their engineers couldn't figure out IRC".

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