After 30 years the market is finally prime for a managed IRC service.
I think this really shows that federated protocols can really stagnate.
LOL. Most people use mIRC on windows, tell me this is not bloated.
Hell IRC doesn't even let you browse history. How can you people not see that Slack is vastly superior to IRC (apart from the openness of course).
One major problem with IRC is that nobody else does. Just a few other nerds are running irssi on a VPS. It's hard to grow a community when everyone is offline as soon as they close their laptop.
Compare that to all of the out of the box conveniences of Slack/Discord, there's no contest.
That's the killer app for Slack. Not images or emoji or gifs or file transfer, that's just icing on the cake. The killer is that everyone is "online" even if they're offline. As long as your message isn't time sensitive, you can fire it off and when the person logs back in they will see it.
Everyone who says Slack is just IRC is ignoring the fact that IRC doesn't allow you to chat with people who are offline. That's the game changer.
Fun, sure, but useful? Ehh...I dunno. It seems like you have some specific use in mind and I'm curious, so if you don't mind me asking, what do you use them for?
Github signal/noise has increased significantly from emoji reactions reducing all the 'me too' comments.
This is both useful for weeding out mostly-pointless "I agree" statements, and for encouraging people who would not otherwise send support to do so.
Compare this, without emojis:
user1: I think we should try $THING.
user2: Yes, that's useful.
user3: But what about $OTHER_THING?
user4: I agree.
user3: See, $USER4 agrees with me.
user1: $OTHER_THING is too pricy for us right now.
user4: No, I was typing at the same time. I agree we should try $THING.
user5: $OTHER_THING is my preference!
user6: I've used $THING before and loved it!
user1: I think we should try $THING. (5 :+1: emojis)
user3: But what about $OTHER_THING? (1 :+1: emoji)
user1: $OTHER_THING is too pricy for us right now.
user6: I've used $THING before and loved it!
Messages on this websites have a number of points associated with them based on the number of upvotes and downvotes they get (if any). But we can't directly see the number of points a particular post has (though we can indirectly infer it by how it's sorted compared to its sibling messages and whether the text is grey rather than black).
But, even without this information, the vast majority of posts and responses are informative and have some substance. For example, I didn't just post a 2 word response to your post saying "I disagree".
Forums that didn't have voting or emoji reaction support didn't have problems with "me too" posts. Neither did usenet.
On that note, I noticed that my original post was downvoted. I personally think that it would be more useful if the person who downvoted it had posted a reply instead and detailed the reasons they disagreed with what I posted earlier (like you did). The latter contributes to the discussion. The former doesn't really provide any useful information other than someone out there disagrees with me and I have no insight as to why.
> How can you people not see
History, I guess? Any sort of online communication tool that requires a master isn't one; it's simply contributing to a network effect that needs to be monetised. That it exchanges messages is almost coincidental.
Frankly, the fact that IRC has a high barrier of entry means the signal to noise ratio on it is way better than traditional chat apps, at least inside of companies.
No doubt someone will reply "that's not what it's for!"