Because IRC is old and badly designed. People keep talking about IRC but no one want to go back there because it's just bad compare to Slack, there is no history, no rich text, no integration what's so ever to anything recent.
Probably because IRC is an outdated protocol with inferior features to Slack and very few good open source options for connecting. For example:
* DCC is still unreliable.
* There is no audio connection option, which is quite popular in 2018.
* Channel history management is ad hoc
* Authentication is done in band, in plain text.
* "secured" channels rely on this bad authentication, and if they don't (perhaps electing to manage it themselves) network flaws can completely steal your channel.
* IRC isn't even particularly open source, many servers and networks have private patches that are not shared publicly.
IRC isn't better than slack. I agree with you that it's confusing why people suggest that it ought to be.
Also, most IRC networks are controlled by entities even more inscrutable than Slack's executive team and board. I can go look up who runs slack, I cannot actually find good details on who runs any given IRC network. I have no idea what I'm dealing with or how they're using my data. I have no legal recourse if I do discover bad behavior, and I'm forced by the ossified protocol to keep using their insecure authentication mechanisms which make abuse trivial.
All those articles try to paint it as "open source vs closed source" or "simple vs complex" but the answer is pretty simple: the IRC itself was missing many important features. No offline messages, no multi-device support, no threads, no message archives, no message search, no inline images, no mobile phone support.
Sure, you could have added this as a separate component.. but as long as you claim "we are using IRC" there would be that one person without bouncer and web browser who keeps asking the same question over and over and whines if someones posts an image.
So Slack won on features. Turns out people can tolerate slowness and crowded interface, as long as it gets stuff done. Who would have thought.
I suppose I'm just perplexed at this persistent view that one can just handwave away the fact that IRC doesn't do everything Slack does simply by saying that it could.
Because slack is a better experience and IRC failed to make it work. Just because something is an open standard doesn't mean its the best product. There's probably still room for an open source, confederated IM client with proper workspaces, history management, and ubiquitous clients.
Because IRC-the-protocol currently doesn't have what is requested by the users who prefer Slack over it:
* offline messages
* full history access and search
* fancy authentication schemes
There are some who try to build a full experience similar to what Slack is proposing; I'm thinking of IRCCloud for instance. But then instead of being stuck inside Slack, you're stuck inside IRCCloud (note: for the nice features, not for the basic messages). What we'd need is an open source IRCCloud server and client, that would then become the new standard... then only can IRC compete.
So, it's not just a software issue, it's a protocol issue. Which is why XMPP was born, and Matrix was born, and all other IM protocols were born. But none of them has reached the point where they can overwhelm all the other ones combined, so in the meantime people converge towards a centralized system because it's easier to be up-to-date.
I used IRC a bit in the mid 90s when I first encountered this whole internet thingy. Even though I was young and dumb, it struck me as a bit lame: nerd bullshit with fiddly setup. The async aspects of usenet and email struck me as more scalable, and the web had, you know... graphics.
I had to use IRC again in 2015, and pretty much nothing had changed, except now I was 20 years older.
Most of the criticisms of Slack seem to boil down to: this (whatever it is) is something IRC could do. But it (whatever it is) is virtually always something IRC doesn't do, something it does in some half-arsed fashion (that requires a huge amount of fiddly setup), or something that's supported by only a few clients. How is this not obvious? I'm perpetually mystified that anybody would admit in public to not understanding why Slack is taking a massive dump on IRC.
(Criticisms of Slack's closed nature are valid. It's also worth asking why it has to take up 2GBytes of RAM just to show a tree view, an HTML view and a text box! But don't tell me that you can't understand why Slack is winning anyway.)
This comes up every time, and as usual you have totally missed the point.
IRC is difficult to configure, difficult to host, difficult to use, and does not offer the same feature set as Slack. There is an obvious use case for something like Slack (obviously, because otherwise it would not have millions of users!) and covering one's ears while yelling "IRC! IRC! IRC!" is sort of wilfully ignoring that if it were a suitable solution, Slack would never have taken off.
So none of the benefits that Slack brings over IRC exist? Easy file uploads aren't there? Built in persistence without having to fiddle with bouncers isn't there? Mobile apps that work well aren't there?
People do use Slack because it looks better and is easier to use.... the features you're talking about are possible with IRC, it just requires work that the average consumer isn't willing to do. The other half of the equation is that IRC is better in ways that consumers don't care about, yourself included.
> The only thing Slack has over IRC is a better web client and history.
I'd say that there's a lot more to it than that. IRC isn't intuitive for new, modern users. Take login and password recognition using one of the many NickServ options, for example.
IRC is missing a LOT of the features that make Slack actually useable for its purpose. IRC just isn't a replacement for Slack in most situations, due to its lack of things people take absolutely for granted.
One massive one being keeping history. Another is not being limited to text only, something people absolutely expect in this day and age.
I hear you. IRC is a mess for anything other than ephemeral text-based communication. (Which I only say because I'm sticking to running irssi in a terminal window. I imagine there are clients that work better for other use cases, like inlining gifs, etc.)
But bouncers and bots have been around since the 1990s. There's nothing particularly ad hoc, informally specified, or bug-ridden about them. They are open source and they've been around for longer than some of their users. Slack, by contrast, is proprietary software used for corporate communication, which comes with its upsides and downsides. IRC is just a different tool to solve a different problem.
Since IRC was available for the last 15 years and only a handful of people used it like you, we should conclude that about the same number would do the same with Slack, all the others are just people who shouldn't be using Slack at all.
OP must have little idea or has given little thought to how hard it can be to maintain on-going support for a feature a very, very tiny percentage of customers use.
As far as I know, Slack never pitched as the guys who would rescue IRC out of obscurity and into mainstream. If they did, then you could perhaps fault them for giving up too easily without serious effort.
* 24/7 presence, the reply was "you can do that with a bouncer"
* backlog, the reply was "you can do that with a bouncer"
* full text search, the reply was "that's up to the client implementation"
* file sharing, the reply was "it's already possible with XDCC"
and so on and so forth.
Basically, it's not that Slack is great, it's because IRC as a whole just refused to adapt to what users actually wanted/needed.
reply