Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC | Hacker News Reader

Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC

thenextweb.com

31 pointscrdr8821 comments

As a counterpoint: I am in 78 IRC channels. I've never seen slack mentioned anywhere aside from here on hackernews. I suspect it's not actually converting any long-time users, but only being an effective draw on people who like the new and shiny.

Right, but this is kind of the point. Because Slack is more approachable for the masses, it wins in these scenarios. It doesn't need to convince the longtime IRC users to move across, just the ones that see barrier to entry on IRC as enough of an issue to make the switch. Exactly what happened in Wordpress' situation, it seems.

It'd be neat if there was a modern app for desktop/mobile that leveraged IRC fully as well. Then you'd have a killer.

Slack is pretty neat to communicate with less tech-minded people, it is very accessible. And it has an IRC adapter, 90% of my interaction with slack is in irssi, the rest is on mobile.

I am a long time IRC user and I have been hanging out in the digital nomads slack channel. I've also used Slack at a couple of jobs.

Slack has nifty features like integration with tools, and inline gifs, etc. But the really nice thing is that it feels a little more human. Everyone knows that IRC turns people into jerks. Slack won't completely prevent that, but it does help to promote the feeling of community. It's made for teams, so it's kind of designed around it.

I don't quite understand the huge level of hype around Slack. We use hipchat, which has it's own foibles, and recently tried out Slack at the insistence of one dev who wanted the IRC integration. It was a failure, and the only dev who liked it was the IRC fan, and they were connecting with IRSSI, not the Slack client. I had to set up Slack, and it's true that it's very smooth and easy to set up. Everything around the core feature is beautiful and frictionless.

But the core feature is not good. The chat window is awful, with huge amounts of whitespace between comments and overlarge profile icons. Low information density, one of the lowest I've seen for a chat program. Switching to a compact view improved things, but only a little - but now all the comments start at different points depending on the length of a user's name, making it irritating to follow a conversation as each chat line is not locked to a given position. We found that despite its other shortcomings, we had better quality communication on Hipchat than Slack.

I did notice on their site that they're not marketing to existing chat users. They have video testimonials from people who've never used chat before - what they're lionising in those videos is actually "having chat functionality", not "having Slack in particular". If you're not used to chat, I can see that the above problems wouldn't stand out.

Certainly they above criticisms aren't fundamental flaws, and they can be fixed with some layout design. I did try a couple of user layouts that fixed the craziness, but they had their own problems.

What is killing IRC?

Oh, OK, never heard of you. Get in the line behind ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM, Gtalk, Lync, Facebook/What's App and of course Skype. Get your HipChat bro with you.

I wouldn't be sad to see IRC die if it were for a superior alternative, but seeing it die to get replaced by a propietary alternative simply saddens me.

> That shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s gone through the experience of using IRC for the first time; the barrier to entry was a formidable challenge for the first time user.

I consider this a feature.

Is it really "killing" IRC or just replacing it in a few cases aimed at non-technical people?

There are no real statistics offered up in this article to back up the author's claim, just a handful of anecdotes of people switching to Slack.

our dev group moved to Slack and chat increased noticeably (plenty of our devs would either ignore IRC and not connect to it, or connect to it and forget about it)

it's not just non-technical people that care about polish.

As a long-time IRC fan/user/developer-of-chatbots, I wouldn't entirely mind if things transitioned to a proper successor. (The advantage of IRC is that it's extremely easy to work with/implement on a basic level. The disadvantage is edge cases and things like NickServ which, while not official, might as well be.)

Slack seems well-positioned for this, but I'm still somewhat rooting for something more like Matrix ( http://matrix.org/ ), because that's an open protocol.

It's a shame there wasn't widespread support for XMPP's XEP-0045 (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html). It was the closest thing to IRC that I believe could've made it the new communication powerhouse in its place with its adoption by Google and Facebook, among others. IRC is great but there's no denying it's dying. It's shed to 60% of its userbase since 2003. It's not gaining new users.

Matrix (http://matrix.org/) looks pretty good, but I feel that it's trying to fill a niche that isn't there. A simple, open (in terms of channels / rooms), chat protocol that doesn't have a complex barrier to entry would work wonders.

I doubt that the majority of people who use IRC are ever gonna switch to Slack. I personally cannot stand Slack - so noisy, so distracting - if I have to use something other than IRC, it will be HipChat, Gitter [0], or Kato [1], but I guess there's a demographic that just loves wasting time with animated gifs...

[0] https://gitter.im/

[1] https://kato.im/

Ubuntu and its derivatives have hardly killed off less user-friendly distributions like Gentoo, Slackware, Arch or even Debian. On a broader scale, Chromebooks may be gaining popularity but they will not be replacing the ultrabook or even the netbook so easily. No single method of messaging has ever come close to replacing email. No matter how FOSS it becomes, Windows is not going to displace Linux or BSD distros when it comes to servers. Bitnami is not going to stop people rolling their own web applications and solution stacks.

Slack has its use-cases. Collaborative chat for non-tech people who either do not want customisation, or cannot be trusted with it, to communicate rapidly from any device and easily integrate with popular filesharing/social media applications in private channels. Sounds great but it's bloody specific when you think about it.

In a way, if you were to slap Microsoft Office apps into it, Slack would be what Office365 should have been. And it may yet prove to be an Office365 killer. but it is not going to displace IRC. As another comment has said, IRC filters users by their ability to actually learn about it, rather like cryptocurrencies--they're not very complicated at entry level but there is an entry hurdle that precludes any old numpty from joining in. IRC has long been a haven for people who want to avoid at least a percentage of the web's numpties.

Slack won't even replace forums because fundamentally a Slack team has no identity, no creative control. I can't see SomethingAwful or Hacker News being replaced by Slack. It's not even just about style/design: HN's arc implementation, and basically any community's solution stack, is part of what makes it a separate entity. Slack is too impersonal, too clinical to make for much of a walled garden as many forums seem to be.

To say Slack is killing IRC may be going a bit far, but if I were to setup an open chat system today for a project or group, I would certainly use Slack in instances where IRC would have made more sense in the past.

The cited example of WordPress is a good one. For contributors or newcomers, IRC has issues -- especially when it comes to engaging with a channel on mobile devices (lack of push for IRC without a separate relay for that exact purpose is definitely a problem).

My only problem is that I use Slack for work/a few personal groups and HipChat for a few other things. I wish I could somehow fuse the two together for one interface. But hey, I'd rather have 2 apps than deal with IRC all the damn time.

I wish I could somehow fuse the two together for one interface.

Both Hipchat and Slack support the Jabber protocol, so you could potentially work out something there.

The process of joining IRC (which comes naturally to us today), is actually really complicated for the non-techie. This is a good thing, because we value IRC for like-minded folk. It feels like we're part of a cult. I don't think many of us want the masses to come to IRC. IRC is a filter, so keep the Facebook/WhatsApp/Snapchat/etc. away.

Oh, and if Slack is making IRC redundant, KiwIRC, Mibbit, IRCloud and the rest are making it easily accessible.

grabs pitchfork

I doubt Slack will take some IRC channels. For many, there's an unique nostalgic charm that ties up a lot of communities. There's a lot more than just frontend design and PR.

No surprise here. Speaking personally, I usually present Slack as IRC with search and a slew of integrations with all sorts of useful services. HipChat is quite neat as well.

There's arguably a case for IRC regardless, e.g. for when you want to be interacting with arbitrary users. Though even there, one might point to WordPress and highlight that they're using Slack for this too.

Come back when slack works over i2p, then I'll dump IRC.

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