It's a bit of a shame that there isn't a company that offers corporate IRC hosting with a client as rich as the Slack client.
Some of the benefits of Slack are things like:
- the rich integrations
- emoji responses + emoji statuses
- video calls that "just work"
- good search (for stored knowledge across a company)
- pinned messages
- notifications people are snoozed and the ability to force a notification
Slack's search is absolutely horrible, in my opinion. It's one of the things I complain about.
Pff, speak for yourself. I used the slack IRC gateway until it was shut down as an alternative to just not using slack. Now I use wee-slack, which works great.
To respond point by point:
- the rich integrations [don't know what you mean]
- emoji responses + emoji statuses [wee-slack has this]
- video calls that "just work" [didn't know Slack had this]
- good search (for stored knowledge across a company) [Slack doesn't have this]
- pinned messages [not sure what this is good for; are you familiar with IRC's "/topic"?]
- notifications people are snoozed and the ability to force a notification [IRC's had the former in many forms for years and I don't think the latter is a benefit]Speak for yourself. I never left and I find it very tedious when I'm forced to use anything else. In practice 90% of the justification for any other system seems to be that people want to post inane cat pictures at each other. That just isn't worth the tradeoffs for me. The 'modern replacements' for IRC are even bigger workplace distractions than IRC.
I use RocketChat for my consulting business for a few reasons that are largely unavailable on IRC without bots:
1) Rich text and syntax highlighting - Small properly fenced off code blocks are a wonder. Contrast that to IRC where it would never look quite right, relies on the other person's client to have monospaced fonts, and usually gets you yelled at for flooding
2) URL expanding - Viewing titles and a snippet of the content is useful. Requires bots on IRC.
3) File sharing in a trivial non-p2p. Nobody liked DCC, and I shudder thinking of going back to opening port ranges for that.
4) Reliability of having a central history which alleviates needing a bouncer, and reduces how important a stable connection actually is.
The only other thing you could come back with is to use yet other external platforms to alleviate those issues like:
For 1) An external public/private pastebin solution
For 2) A bot as I already said
For 3) An external filsharing service: Dropbox, Nextcloud, etc
For 4) External bnc: ZNC, bip, weechat, irssi etc
RocketChat, Mattermost, Slack, et al incorporate all of those things and more and are inherently useful - Plus, if you're the administrator you don't have to enable gifs or cat pictures, yes that shit is dumb.
Rich text is generally worthless except for code highlighting, but pasting large amounts of code into the channel is generally considered antisocial on IRC anyway, and pastebin services are used for this. It's not unusual for a company to provide their own internal pastebin services anyway, since it's generally useful with other systems like email. Ditto file sharing.
> "Oh come on can we drop the cat pictures trope?"
No, because in my personal experience that is OVERWHELMINGLY the most frequently used feature of slack/etc that's not present in IRC. For every time I've seen pasted code, I've seen easily a hundred inane pasted memes. I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't earnestly believe it's the primary reason people prefer systems other than IRC.
Having to search the entire conversation history in the chat window is a terrible idea because it's slow and difficult to use. Having a separate tool or page to search history is a superior solution, and software exists to do that in IRC.
Rich text is over rated, and 99% of messages don't use it anyway. Believe it or not nobody wants to see your silly gif, and they'd be just fine with :-) instead of an emoji.
Integrating with IRC is also trivial because its a standardized open protocol and there are a ton of tools available. It doesn't need a bunch of pre-fab "integrations" because it's not using a dumb proprietary API.
But having an IT guy spend half a day properly setting up an IRC server is hard and it doesn't have a crappy web UI by default, so lets all use Slack.
Many people here want to write about code in their chats so at the very least want to have an option for monospacing parts of a message.
You’re being flippant pretending it’s about GIFs rather than a genuine use case.
> using a dumb proprietary API
Why do you need to insult other people’s work like that?
Fair enough, but I would still argue that if somebody's posting enough code for that to matter, a link to a pastebin or a Github Gist, with syntax highlighting, is a better solution.
> Why do you need to insult other people’s work like that?
Because it's a poor choice to create a proprietary chat protocol because it allows Slack to control what people can say and how they say it.
Be wary of simply justifying why it's not the end of the world when a feature is missing, which is a much different argument. For example, I bet everyone who uses IRC appreciates some sort of indication for when they are mentioned even though they could ctrl-f for their username every once in a while instead.
I'd argue that you don't need to post "enough code" to benefit from monospace or multiline support. A developer channel in IRC is full of one-liners that would be improved by monospace.
Also, as a heavy IRC user, it's pretty painful following code discussion through a bunch of external links.
Compare that to my developer-centric Slack channels like Elm lang's where short code snippets are used heavily and it's easy to see context, it's so much more convenient. And when someone does have enough code, they can use Slack's snippet feature.
But I feel like you can always respond to any feature someone likes with "but why not just [inferior solution], it's not that bad". These things simply add up. :)
FWIW, by default my IRC client notifies me when I've been mentioned. A benefit of using an open protocol is that people can develop different clients that cater to their needs.
For code discussions I open a browser and an IRC window side by side. If I'm not paying attention to the conversation I just close the browser and don't have code snippets polluting the chat window.
> But I feel like you can always respond to any feature someone likes with "but why not just [inferior solution], it's not that bad". These things simply add up. :)
I feel that goes both ways, though. Just in this thread people have complained that Slack uses an absurd amount of resources and is proprietary, only to have the concerns sidelined as not important.
Most IRC clients (I'm thinking of HexChat) let you choose the font, which you can set to a monospace font.
Classic example is the rare power-user running irssi on a VPN so that they can receive messages/mentions while offline. The issue is that nobody else does it. Everyone else parts the second they close their laptop and probably won't remember to rejoin until they have another question to ask. You respond to someone and, whoops, they've already left. The whole community suffers.
Obviously it's true: you can bend your client to your will and that's nice. But what HNers typically do next is wonder why everyone doesn't want to do it. Or they criticize everyone else for not seeing the light. Though I'll admit I'm also responding to multiple sibling comments next to yours, not just you.
Whenever IRC comes up, HN always reminds me of The Simpson's Principal Skinner quote: "Am I out of touch? No, it's the [Slack users] who are wrong."
And IRC supports UTF-8 and unicode emojis just fine.
> But having an IT guy spend half a day properly setting up an IRC server is hard and it doesn't have a crappy web UI by default, so lets all use Slack.
I've found my organization uses Slack less because of the buzzy features and more to route around the brain damage of IT.
E.g., IT won't allow standing up communication servers with access allowed from outside the Corp intranet. Especially IRC.
Sales and support engineers frequently need chat access from outside the corp network. Ergo, 3rd party chat solution.
Slack is the worst solution in many ways, but it turns out fixing idiotic 90s security policies in IT departments is hard and you have to completely block the public internet to block Slack.
I’m pretty sure asking users to leave their app and go to a separate webpage to search wouldn’t sit well with most users, particularly people who are involved in some kind of deadline for their project—what we might brush off as “it’s just like two extra clicks!” is actually much more disrupting. It pulls you out of your workflow and those extra clicks feel like they add up over time.
While some of us may sneer at chat apps like Slack, it’s obvious their UX/UI heavily resonates with users.
We should be looking at why users absolutely prefer Slack and see if we can build a client based on an open protocol which will give the user experience most users prefer while still maintaining an irc type experience for users like us.
I have to disagree with this. Having to search for historical messages right where you can see recent messages is convenient. Using a different tool (potentially with a different UI) increases the context switch overhead. And there's no reason the search must be slow; the current chat window can display a portion of the messages, and the search can be done either on the server, or a background thread searching a database locally. Slack in particular has some bad engineering to make its UI slow and memory-hungry, but many of its copycats are actually functionally similar yet much faster.
IRC is ancient, and pretty much broken, but it still works fantastically well for some things, and I really like having a text-based client to run in a tmux.
EDIT: IRC, XMPP, and such, support integration just fine via bots.
Apart from federation you’ve described Slack.
Neither IRC nor Jabber give it to you out of the box. Slack does.
I never heart anyone complain about inline images / gifs (which is also something that most IRC clients support) or that it's paid (which IRC bouncers / clients are often too in cases).
I personally quite like IRC but I understand why people are less keen.
It's not the way of the majority. Probably not the way of the entire center of the bell curve.
Replies in chains are a mixed bag. It makes it easier to follow that particular conversation, but the UI/UX is godawful to the point of it being more confusing than just in-band discussion, IMO.
For example in Whatsapp I often check a notification and find its just a smiley or thumbs-up
I'm glad that IRC works for you, but it's 2018. We can do better than slate and chalk.
We actual do this with an IRC client we developed for internal use.