Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
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Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
#2As a counterpoint: I am in 78 IRC channels. I've never seen slack mentioned anywhere aside from here on hackernews. I suspect it's not actually converting any long-time users, but only being an effective draw on people who like the new and shiny.
Re: Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
#3I doubt that the majority of people who use IRC are ever gonna switch to Slack. I personally cannot stand Slack - so noisy, so distracting - if I have to use something other than IRC, it will be HipChat, Gitter [0], or Kato [1], but I guess there's a demographic that just loves wasting time with animated gifs...
[1] https://kato.im/
Re: Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
#4I wouldn't be sad to see IRC die if it were for a superior alternative, but seeing it die to get replaced by a propietary alternative simply saddens me.
Re: Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
#5No surprise here. Speaking personally, I usually present Slack as IRC with search and a slew of integrations with all sorts of useful services. HipChat is quite neat as well.
There's arguably a case for IRC regardless, e.g. for when you want to be interacting with arbitrary users. Though even there, one might point to WordPress and highlight that they're using Slack for this too.
Re: Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
#6I doubt Slack will take some IRC channels. For many, there's an unique nostalgic charm that ties up a lot of communities. There's a lot more than just frontend design and PR.
Re: Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
#7As a counterpoint: I am in 78 IRC channels. I've never seen slack mentioned anywhere aside from here on hackernews. I suspect it's not actually converting any long-time users, but only being an effective draw on people who like the new and shiny.
Right, but this is kind of the point. Because Slack is more approachable for the masses, it wins in these scenarios. It doesn't need to convince the longtime IRC users to move across, just the ones that see barrier to entry on IRC as enough of an issue to make the switch. Exactly what happened in Wordpress' situation, it seems.
Re: Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
#8Is it really "killing" IRC or just replacing it in a few cases aimed at non-technical people?
There are no real statistics offered up in this article to back up the author's claim, just a handful of anecdotes of people switching to Slack.
Re: Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
#9As a long-time IRC fan/user/developer-of-chatbots, I wouldn't entirely mind if things transitioned to a proper successor. (The advantage of IRC is that it's extremely easy to work with/implement on a basic level. The disadvantage is edge cases and things like NickServ which, while not official, might as well be.)
Slack seems well-positioned for this, but I'm still somewhat rooting for something more like Matrix ( http://matrix.org/ ), because that's an open protocol.
Re: Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC
#10To say Slack is killing IRC may be going a bit far, but if I were to setup an open chat system today for a project or group, I would certainly use Slack in instances where IRC would have made more sense in the past.
The cited example of WordPress is a good one. For contributors or newcomers, IRC has issues -- especially when it comes to engaging with a channel on mobile devices (lack of push for IRC without a separate relay for that exact purpose is definitely a problem).
My only problem is that I use Slack for work/a few personal groups and HipChat for a few other things. I wish I could somehow fuse the two together for one interface. But hey, I'd rather have 2 apps than deal with IRC all the damn time.