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Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

> There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff.

So instead of paying someone to maintain it, you pay someone to maintain it who keeps all your data from you and prevents you from accessing it, and who admits he’ll read all your stuff.

How is that better again?

That said, IRCCloud already does it for free, in the cloud, just works™, and the Quassel people are also working on improving ease of use and deployment.

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> So instead of paying someone to maintain it, you pay someone to maintain it who keeps all your data from you and prevents you from accessing it, and who admits he’ll read all your stuff.

You aren't paying "someone" you're paying an entire company that is dedicated to making the application highly available, with all the bells and whistles, with zero hassle.

Really, if you think IRC is so similar to Slack, then why are so many companies, organizations flocking to it? There has to be a reason.

> Really, if you think IRC is so similar to Slack, then why are so many companies, organizations flocking to it? There has to be a reason.

If HN has higher discussion quality than reddit, why are not all devs on HN instead? If Linux is better for servers, why are people still starting projects on Windows? etc...

The power of marketing, directly or word-of-mouth, is important. And a decentral community can never do as perfect marketing as a company can do.

There are IRC clients and apps, and third party integrations as powerful as Slack, and as easy to use. But you have to find them, install them separately – there’s no single combined effort to market a single "just works" solution, yet ;)

How many people maintain their own email servers vs. use gmail?

Slack doesn't prevent you from accessing your data, in fact they explicitly built exporting features.

We're talking about open source, so reading your stuff shouldn't be a problem. For proprietary, maybe, but even then, reading someone's private slack info would be highly damaging to their brand, and to what benefit?

"prevents you from accessing it"

with respect to something like e-discovery its all a matter of perspective. If this were true, which it isn't, I wouldn't necessarily mind, as the financial worth of combined ancient IRC logs is unquestionably a net negative value.

You can get upset over this and argue with people, but that's not going to make anyone choose IRC over Slack.

Slack, Hipchat, Campfire, etc. are all just IRC for normal people. There is without a doubt a barrier to entry to IRC that actually requires a bit of understanding of how the protocol works. "I'm in #this-channel-you-told-me-about, but no one else is in here, wtf?". "Oh, you're on the wrong network - it's EFNet, not Freenode".

There is no such barrier for the current set of chat apps. Download > Login with google, start chatting with the person who invited you. Search history? File sharing? No need to remember anything about dcc/xdcc, no need to manage servers running bots, no need to manage anything, really; it's all taken care of by the nerds that run the service.

I think one might actually be able to build a business by building a Slack that runs on top of IRC, and releasing client apps that actually significantly reduce the flexibility that a standard IRC client gives you. If you can get the on boarding flow to invite -> download -> log in -> start chatting with the people you want to chat with, you could crush slack (assuming you had the marketing budget to compete with theirs).

I think, however, that IRC will remain in some ways as a small haven from eternal September (haha, yeah, I know). The barrier to entry is a feature, not a bug.

> I think one might actually be able to build a business by building a Slack that runs on top of IRC, and releasing client apps that actually significantly reduce the flexibility that a standard IRC client gives you. If you can get the on boarding flow to invite -> download -> log in -> start chatting with the people you want to chat with, you could crush slack (assuming you had the marketing budget to compete with theirs).

Someone did, it's called IRCCloud.

That's the entire problem I've been talking about above: Anything you can imagine regarding IRC already exists. The only issue is that you don't know about it yet, and have to find it. And without marketing, or any lists of what is good and not, this is hard.

Then start actual marketing. And make sure that I can switch from Slack to your product without any hangups, and have exactly the same feature parity, especially for non-technical users.

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