Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)

Want to send a file to someone? Drag and drop, done. No hassle and it works for everyone, in the same way, without having to explain anything, use an external website, install a dependency, or change a setting.

Same as with Discord, these modern chat clients support richer content, have nicer looking UIs, better UX which draw more people in.

It's more fun to code bots for them because you can make them do amazing stuff, as the output doesn't just have to be plain text, but it can also be rich content like charts, embeds, propmts that can trigger multiple actions by selecting a reaction emoji, you get the idea.

Just overall a great, low friction and _modern_ experience.

Consider email for example: I think the main reason it's stuck around with us for so long is that we're at the point where being reachable by email is just expected. With everyone using email, someone trying to replace it with a centralized option would need to get everyone on board, while someone who wants to interoperate with email in general doesn't have that issue.

ISPs and phone companies are similar; nobody's going to start one that can't interoperate with the others nowadays. The public wouldn't stand for it, even if they couldn't explain why in terms of the underlying protocols.

While I would certainly love it if we could get people to care about open protocols, I think getting enough adoption of an open protocol would really be sufficient, so long as it's not easy for one big player to lock it down. (Google Talk for example; it was XMPP, but Google was the only player that mattered then as far as the public was concerned. Matrix is in a better position than that now.)

Yes, Slack borrowed some of the better features from IRC, which helped drive its popularity, but very, very few companies that are currently paying for Slack would have considered IRC to be a reasonable alternative.

And the kind of companies that value self-hosting will usually want this to be set up inside the company's internal network. So you'll have a bunch of firewall issues to get through, otherwise good luck getting your users to connect to some non-publicly-accessible server from their phones.

Other comments talk about how Slack nailed the UX for users to join a Slack workspace. But they also nailed the UX for getting a workspace set up in the first place.

(Well ok the whole idea of separate accounts per workspace thing is a bit of a mess, but they nailed everything else)

I think another benefit to slack is you can come back to it and see the history. IRC is ephemeral unless you stick to a single device and leave it running. That's impossible for a mobile phone.

It frustrates me that some large projects (ex Ansible) who insist on all discussions there, and explicitly ignore things like GitHub issues.