UX isn't really a function of the protocol though.
With email, you see a lot more diversity in UX experiences between clients.
IRC chat has historically been a CLI interaction, with limits what you can do, UX-wise. And even the GUI clients tend to emulate much of what you'd have in a CLI or TUI. There is a lot that could be done to make it more friendly to a new user.
But, that extra amount of complexity that's involved with a protocol approach (which program should I use? which server do I connect to?) is definitely a UX issue. But, I think these are issues that could be solved w/in the community. For example, Libera. Chat has a nice set of pages that start with "Which client should I use?". I could completely see a set of "How to use IRC" pages to help new users get started.
Average Joe and Sally want Web 3.0 UX shiny, they don't want nerdy CLIs or overcomplicated setups. The HN crowd has blinders on when it comes to this because we're power users, the complexity doesn't bother us but it's a complete non-starter for normal people.
Maybe not completely, though. The guide is definitely helpful, but a lot of people don't want a list of 10 different options to have to trudge through. Even if you're more than skilled enough to understand and digest a guide like that, going through it and making a choice still takes mental energy that busy people don't necessarily want to expend.
What sites like Slack and Discord offer that, to the best of my knowledge, no IRC network does, is a one stop shop. A "go to webpage, click button, now you're chatting" experience, all hosted right there in one place, together with free and zero-configuration apps for both desktop and mobile with push and perhaps even email notifications and all sorts of goodies like that.
Which I personally think is fine. Maintaining that kind of tightly integrated experience costs money. Corporate money. Which, as this freenode kerfuffle illustrates, isn't necessarily something I want getting quite so tangled up in my IRC networks. But I'm also fine with communities that have different values or are trying to cater to different audiences choosing an option that feels better to them. I'm not sure it serves anyone's interests to be a busybody about these things.
Kiwi chat does this. In fact IRC offers this better than slack and Discord because it doesn't require creating an account (which is why so many of my friends stick with imessage and mms.)
With Slack, an organization can put a link on their website, and users can click it and be taken more-or-less straight to that organization's chat.
With irc, yes you can post a link to Kiwi, but then, to actually get connected to that organization's chat, you need to navigate a somewhat confusing configuration dialog that includes, among other things, two different server selection controls, one of which is a dropdown list of maybe 200 different options, and a number of buttons with jargon names, none of which is, to an uninitiated IRC user, obviously the one to take you to the chat, and some of which are prone to doing flat-out nothing when you click on them. The one they do want, which they probably won't click because the UI is laid out to make it look like it's only for advanced users, tends to give useless error messages if you get some configuration wrong, anyway. Which someone new to IRC is likely to do, because the form is confusing and provides no guidance or validation.
So, not only is it quite a few more steps than "go to webpage, click button, now you're chatting", but several of those additional ones are liable to cause people to give up.
A now-deleted comment in this thread said that they like irc because it keeps less technical people away, which they felt improved the quality of discussions. Regardless of one's opinion of that sentiment, I think that the effect in question is undeniably real, and it perhaps creates a situation where avid IRC users have a tendency to lose track of what counts as acceptable user experience for the rest of the world.
>With Slack, an organization can put a link on their website, and users can click it and be taken more-or-less straight to that organization's chat.
This is not at all my experience with slack.
>yes you can post a link to Kiwi,
It's been a while since I tried setting it up but IIRC you can post links to kiwi with parameters which skips the configuration dialog and just asks for a nickname then dumps you into the channel. It's not really possible to improve on that.
With email, you see a lot more diversity in UX experiences between clients.
IRC chat has historically been a CLI interaction, with limits what you can do, UX-wise. And even the GUI clients tend to emulate much of what you'd have in a CLI or TUI. There is a lot that could be done to make it more friendly to a new user.
But, that extra amount of complexity that's involved with a protocol approach (which program should I use? which server do I connect to?) is definitely a UX issue. But, I think these are issues that could be solved w/in the community. For example, Libera. Chat has a nice set of pages that start with "Which client should I use?". I could completely see a set of "How to use IRC" pages to help new users get started.
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