Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Frondo | Hacker News Reader

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I've been IRCing for 24 years. I know about bouncers, different clients, etc., and I still prefer Slack to IRC.

I like knowing that it's going to handle unicode properly, in all cases, for everyone on the Slack channel. I like that it handles right-to-left text for everyone reading.

I like not having to ever think about, is my bouncer down? I also like not having to think about, where am I going to run my bouncer? It's nice not having to think about that stuff at all. I've got a lot on my plate, keeping a bouncer up and running somewhere (just so I don't lose history!) doesn't need to be another thing I do.

I like the plugins, the integrations with various other services. I like the convenience and polish. No IRC client compares to Slack for integrations and polish. It takes friction out of my daily chat experience.

I've even moved some private irc channel chats to Slack channels, because it's just a more pleasant experience in 2017. No regrets about any of that.

I used IRC a lot as a teen back in the late 80s early-to-mid 90s. This was back when to make a private channel you would have to join a channel that was a negative number and hope nobody else wandered in on a guess (which was unlikely to happen since the number of users was literally under 200 at peak times). Pre-Eris, Pre-EFNet, etc.

Despite the nostalgic kick of it, I never used it as a serious work tool at any of my jobs, haven't used IRC at all in probably a decade, and totally agree that options like Slack are just plain better work communication tools.

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.)

I think these are all key points. The user experience in Slack is so easy, convenient and polished. It takes friction away from communication, allowing effort to be focused on the tasks at hand.

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