The replies really should be "no, stop wanting that." IRC is not meant for such interactions, and is built around different social expectations. If you want 24/7 presence, then you ought to justify it socially, because there is a qualitative cultural difference between folks who regularly idle on IRC vs. folks who are only connected to IRC when they actively want to discuss something. Similarly, backlogs are only marginally useful and are usually a security risk, but the typical client does offer full-text search through IRC backlogs, when needed, and I'm not sure why that's a problem for users.
It's obvious why Slack wins for businesses: Because it gives businesses greater control and legibility over their employees' work habits and decision-making. DCC or any other P2P connection is anathema to this sort of control.
Users want different things. They want both plain text and rich text, and similarly, they want both plain chat and rich chat.
Oh, and aside from all of this, there is a working group [0] which publishes proposals for modernization of the IRC protocol. Adoption rates are low, but perhaps that should tell you something about what users actually want.
Well, I think the argument is to increase the number of people who do use IRC - I'd say that Slack has proved people want features like that. If existing IRC users don't want to use the features, they don't have to.
If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring:
Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app.
Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point).
Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screenshot with someone? Drag it into the app and they can get it at their leisure. No need to mess around with DCC send or uploading to Google Drive and sharing a link, it's right there.
All of these could be solved with IRC (in fact, Slack was initially built around IRC) but they require extra infrastructure and tooling and development to make it seamless, and that takes extra development and hosting costs.
I don't think people want IRC for the lack of functionality. I think they miss IRC because they see in Slack a real threat to decentralization, privacy and openness.
I don't use IRC. But I'd never use Slack either in a project I maintain/lead. We need a better alternative.
I'm fairly indifferent towards Slack, but I don't get your point about the beauty of IRC. If you don't want to receive Slack messages outside the workday, why are you on it at that time? I just close the client.
But we're talking about reasons people ended up choosing slack over something like IRC (or, really, any open protocol instant messaging specification).
The grand-parent comment raises good points, people want these things, being connected and reachable while not being connected to the server with any client and having a context later on. These are problems that can be solved but nobody has put effort into making a sexy product to do it. (and monetising that kind of product might be troublesome)
Slack is a widely used product, but its use is tiny compared to IRC. IRC isn't just tech people, it's very widely used by a really huge, diverse range of people.
Your original comment said 'the days of simplistic IRC protocols are gone' and then you gave a bunch of features with the implication that simple protocols can't handle those features.
I simply explained why those features are absolutely implementable over simple protocols, and also why IRC isn't actually a simple protocol - DCC is an example of something not at all simple in IRC.
I didn't say that IRC itself, in its current incarnation, solves those problems.
Ultimately you're basically saying 'I want a couple of features and because slack provides them, I'm going to justify my use of slack by comparing slack to the least featureful chat thing out there: IRC'. IRC's strengths aren't its features, it's its openness, familiarity, hackability, conceptual simplicity and community control. In fact, the things people that like IRC dislike most about it are the few parts that aren't open, hackable, simple or controlled by the community.
I don't particularly like IRC as a protocol. Maybe its time has come, maybe the replacement will be called 'IRCv3' or 'IRCv4' or called something else. Whether that replacement is called 'IRC' is not important. What is important is that it remains open (in spirit and in practice), hackable, simple and controlled by the community. Slack replaces a distributed, network-failure-proof system (IRC) with a centralised, corporate-controlled, paid, closed, proprietary solution. That's the worst possible collection of properties. Yeah you can search messages, yes it has a nice user interface, but that's about it.
>The point was it isn't built, where as there's auto completion support for emojis which wouldn't even need that "trivial" software. That's in the matrix's sdk. If it's so trivial, please, build for the IRC community. I use hexchat on my desktop and weechat on the server. Would you mind building me one if it is trivial?
I can't tell if this is a joke. This is literally:
1. map names to emojis
2. autocompleting input field on those names
3. append a couple of bytes to a string
This is 100% purely a user interface feature, it has nothing at all to do with the server or the protocol. You could implement this for literally any chat client that supported UTF-8 quite easily.
Isn’t that kind of the point. A conservative approach to adding features so that they can be at least implemented well and understood?
What are the main, real benefits slack has over IRC;
* resilience to network disruption
* onboarding of new users.
* inline media (clients, not protocol, should implement this)
You could argue threads or SIP/VOIP but my admittedly anecdotal evidence suggests that these are seldom used. And, there’s no reason IRC could not expand to relay those.
I think IRC suffers from a public image issue due to poor UX. I had someone tell me the other day that the reason they think Slack is better than IRC is because the chat is prettier, as if that isn't completely user replaceable.
It also has a higher barrier of entry, since you have to find and likely install a client, find a server to connect that client to, and know what channels to join in order to find conversation (assuming your IT policy isn't blocking IRC ports, and the irc server doesn't require ident auth). Most IRC client UIs are still inspired by irssi, high in utility and information density, but low in glamor. Monospaced fonts are typically the default.
Slack doesn't require any of these things, you click a button on a website, enter your name, and are put right into general chat. The UI is carefully designed and aesthetically pleasing. Since entire groups are topic specific, you don't have to go looking for the specific room you want. Slack removes the burden of choice.
There's not enough being done to resolve this problem for IRC. IrcCloud has tried to solve the client problem, putting it all in a browser, eliminating the networking aspect, and making the UI as pleasing as they can, but there's nothing to be done for the discovery issue that doesn't also hamstring IRC power users.
There's a lot of things that day to day businesses users will need that Slack (and the clones) provide but IRC basically can't. And they're kind of way more fundamental to the basic interactions than your idea of adding video calls.
- User authentication, preferably via some semi-standardized form of single-signon (e.g. SAML, or maybe OAuth).
- Users being able to receive messages even when all their devices are offline.
- Users being able to connect from multiple clients at the same time, with good UX. With IRC, people doing that will have to have a separate nick for each client they connect from. And people who want to @ them or /msg them will need to know which of the near-duplicate nicks to actually choose. Choose poorly, and your message might be sent to a device where it won't be read for hours even though the recipient really is actively online.
- State sync across the clients. If I've read some specific messages on one client, they should not show up as unread on my other clients.
- A consistent user experience. In IRC there's no reliable cross-client way of tagging a message for the attention of some set of users. Sure, clients will do various levels of nick highlighting. But the exact patterns will vary between clients, and the sender can't even know whether they got the format right since the decision on the highlighting happens purely on the receiver's end.
And that's not even getting into the things that IRC can reasonably do, but that are incredibly kludgy. Say history search in a channel. No organization wants to run channel logging bots, and no normal user wants to go to a totally separate service to do a search.
I don't really disagree with you... but I often wonder how much Slack actually adds to IRC. We use it at work (and as a 100% remote person in a mostly co-located team, it is a godsend). I can't really think of anything in Slack that wouldn't be easy to implement with IRC bots.
Persistent history is easy. Email notification is easy. Storage of various assets like text snippets and pictures is easy. I've never used any, but I'm assuming that at least one of the web interfaces for IRC works well...
I think the main thing that Slack has done is package it up so that you don't need to cobble together 100 different things -- which is, of course, very valuable. Or at least more valuable than the monthly cost that they charge ;-)
To be honest, I would really rather be using free software. I would be quite happy to pay for a service that made it easy for me (as Slack does), but software freedom is valuable to me.
I hate this argument. Yeah, IRC is open and there are tons of clients for it, but Slack is the only one that I've used that a) retains history without you having to think about it, and b) is actually really really REALLY nice to use.
That said, if all you need is simple team communication, IRC works great
It's obvious why Slack wins for businesses: Because it gives businesses greater control and legibility over their employees' work habits and decision-making. DCC or any other P2P connection is anathema to this sort of control.
Users want different things. They want both plain text and rich text, and similarly, they want both plain chat and rich chat.
Oh, and aside from all of this, there is a working group [0] which publishes proposals for modernization of the IRC protocol. Adoption rates are low, but perhaps that should tell you something about what users actually want.
[0] https://ircv3.net/
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