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Comment by CSMastermind | Hacker News Reader

> Discord, meanwhile, grew out of some combination of gaming/tech IRC servers

For the record this is exactly where Slack came from as well.

From Wikipedia:

> Slack originated as an internal communication tool used within Stewart Butterfield's company, Tiny Speck, during their work on the development of Glitch, an online game. These communication tools were initially built around the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol and included scripts designed to automate and organize file exchanges among their development team.

> In August 2013, Slack was launched to the public and continued to maintain compatibility with IRC, reflecting its origin. Additionally, it was also compatible with XMPP messaging protocols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)

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> However, in May 2018, the company chose to close down these corresponding gateways due to limitations inherent in those protocols.

It was a way to onboard tech people and once they were big enough they closed the door for those audience.

Which really hurt me because i live in a country with a small tech community and was happily interacting with them using irc, until slack changed into a walled garden.

In fairness, can you imagine implementing all of Slack's features over IRC? Nightmare.

or... and stay with me here... you could not implement them for the IRC, but keep the gateway available for people who want to willing trade the "degraded" feature set for the ease and familiarity of a simple, low noise, low distraction environment.

Aka, not behaving in a user hostile way.

Dropping irc was more about control than it was about adding features.

The real problem was when Slack added message reactions. Those weren't visible at all in IRC. They absolutely could have been surfaced, like how Apple sends reactions in SMS chats. In a business context that means missing critical acknowledgements of messages and generally forced our IRC bridge users to switch.

It was a pretty user-hostile way to reduce the number IRC bridge users (to then justify killing it), especially given it took them many years after to get the Electron client to the point where it wasn't a laptop-killer.

That's a trivial example to push to irc (but you already gave the same example I'm about to)

[username] reacted to message [username]: [message]

> In a business context that means missing critical acknowledgements of messages and generally forced our IRC bridge users to switch.

I'm not sure I'd willing call an emoji reaction to a "business critical message" acceptable. Either it's critical, and an emoji reaction (which currently doesn't generate a notification) isn't sufficient, or it's not critical, and someone (I don't mean you, speaking rhetorically) is wound *way* to tight! :D

Surely you can see the issue with having some features just not work for some people? Reactions is the most obvious one. They aren't just for fun - people use them for polls for example.

[username] reacted to message [username]: [message]

> Surely you can see the issue with having some features just not work for some people?

No, I honestly don't. If I'm using IRC, even after slack warns me about missing and unsupported features. That's likely what I want! What if I don't want to see reactions when I'm trying get work done, but I am willing to be interrupted to answer questions, etc? Also, that example is easy to solve for IRC (see above)

People using it for polls is nice, and I think reactions are a useful feature. But there's no reason you can't make a "best effort" to support something people want to use. If I need to react, I'll grab my phone, (or open a browser). Meanwhile I can have access to the information that's *actually* important... text messages.

> [username] reacted to message [username]: [message]

Apple does this for iMessage and as far as I can tell (I don't live in the US) it's widely hated and believed to be deliberately annoying to Android users.

Do you really want 20 or those notifications for popular messages? Are you going to count them up for polls?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

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