Slack won over IRC for me by prohibiting anonymous users. Simply verifying their emails or having it be invite-approvals only was enough to improve my experience dramatically versus IRC’s endless anonymous harassment.
Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)
61–70 of 77 posts
Re: Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)
#62I still kind of struggle to understand why Slack is so popular within the corporate world. It is a good choice when you have some public initiative and let people swarm in, yes. But when it comes to private entities(I'm talking about large corporations), I really don't get it. I've been using MatterMost for years and while it had a rough start, at this point I'd take it over Slack any day of the week. Functionality i…
> I still kind of struggle to understand why Slack is so popular within the corporate world.
Have you used Hipchat or Lync?
Re: Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because everyone wanted a proprietary chat system, whose single client EXE for Windows chews 400+ megs of RAM.
Realistically, people don't tend to care about how much ram they're using, that's why PWA's are able to take the jobs of native applications, and people are even happy about it. People only care if there's not enough resources.
There's never enough resources.
Re: Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)
#64I think the key deciding factor isn't even technical, but: if you want to enter Slack (or Zoom, or similar), it is streamlined, easy and clear what you need to do. Compare it to IRC, where you have to find a client, make the choice, and make many other small decisions. It's also about immediate benefit: the way many people try to start with IRC involves searching for rooms and trying to somehow fit in and enter the c…
> Compare it to IRC, where you have to find a client, make the choice, and make many other small decisions.
A lot of these are one time decisions though. Once I install a client and configure it, then all I have to do for subsequent uses is to start the client and it will automatically connect to the server, set my nick, and join the channels I was in.
With Slack, you still have to create an account, find a workspace, join channels or get invited to them, etc. But once that's done, then you just need to open the Slack client and log in and it will load up the page, much like an IRC client does.
Re: Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The client -> relay protocol for weechat relay is not the same as the client -> ircccloud protocol for irccloud, and both of those are _not_ IRC All those clutches exist to support the deficiencies of IRC, which only proves the initial point: IRC in its current form doesn't do enough, and that's why Slack, with all of those features out-of-the-box, "won".
If you replace IRC with SMTP the story is very different. IRC has a lot of protocol problems but the biggest one was honestly just not having an IMAP equivalent. IRCCloud is just providing the complementary protocol to IRC. Its existence doesn't necessarily mean that IRC is a bad transport protocol.
IRC has no message storage - so not only it has no IMAP, it has no POP3 either.
And IRC is a horrible transport protocol because it handles errors by dropping messages. SMTP has both message-ids and explicit confirmation response to make sure that as long as server comes up, eventually, the message will be delivered exactly once. IRC does not; so it is simply not appropriate for the cases where each message matters.
Re: Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)
#66cause of annoying gif meme posting. and the battle has just began
Re: Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)
#67Slack wasn't competing with IRC. By the time Slack launched, IRC usage within companies was a very tiny slice of the market, mainly by very technical people. Slack was competing with Microsoft Lync, Google Talk, HipChat, Campfire, and the various other "IM for businesses" software products that were available in 2013. Yes, Slack borrowed some of the better features from IRC, which helped drive its popularity, but ver…
Yep, the only place I ever say IRC in actual corporate environments was for private chats for the sysadmins.
Mozilla used IRC until recently, but they're not really a traditional corp environment.
Re: Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)
#68Slack won over IRC for me by prohibiting anonymous users. Simply verifying their emails or having it be invite-approvals only was enough to improve my experience dramatically versus IRC’s endless anonymous harassment.
If you implement services on an IRC server you can do the same.
Re: Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)
#69I still kind of struggle to understand why Slack is so popular within the corporate world. It is a good choice when you have some public initiative and let people swarm in, yes. But when it comes to private entities(I'm talking about large corporations), I really don't get it. I've been using MatterMost for years and while it had a rough start, at this point I'd take it over Slack any day of the week. Functionality i…
> I still kind of struggle to understand why Slack is so popular within the corporate world. Have you used Hipchat or Lync?
Nope, so far I haven't come across a single Atlassian product I can even mildly tolerate so I'm not putting faith in their products unless I have to. Lync - I'm a full time linux user so that's a tough one to say the least.
Re: Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I still kind of struggle to understand why Slack is so popular within the corporate world. Have you used Hipchat or Lync?
Nope, so far I haven't come across a single Atlassian product I can even mildly tolerate so I'm not putting faith in their products unless I have to. Lync - I'm a full time linux user so that's a tough one to say the least.
That should answer your question :)