Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC

I don't quite understand the huge level of hype around Slack. We use hipchat, which has it's own foibles, and recently tried out Slack at the insistence of one dev who wanted the IRC integration. It was a failure, and the only dev who liked it was the IRC fan, and they were connecting with IRSSI, not the Slack client. I had to set up Slack, and it's true that it's very smooth and easy to set up. Everything around the core feature is beautiful and frictionless.

But the core feature is not good. The chat window is awful, with huge amounts of whitespace between comments and overlarge profile icons. Low information density, one of the lowest I've seen for a chat program. Switching to a compact view improved things, but only a little - but now all the comments start at different points depending on the length of a user's name, making it irritating to follow a conversation as each chat line is not locked to a given position. We found that despite its other shortcomings, we had better quality communication on Hipchat than Slack.

I did notice on their site that they're not marketing to existing chat users. They have video testimonials from people who've never used chat before - what they're lionising in those videos is actually "having chat functionality", not "having Slack in particular". If you're not used to chat, I can see that the above problems wouldn't stand out.

Certainly they above criticisms aren't fundamental flaws, and they can be fixed with some layout design. I did try a couple of user layouts that fixed the craziness, but they had their own problems.

> That shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s gone through the experience of using IRC for the first time; the barrier to entry was a formidable challenge for the first time user.

I consider this a feature.

Ubuntu and its derivatives have hardly killed off less user-friendly distributions like Gentoo, Slackware, Arch or even Debian. On a broader scale, Chromebooks may be gaining popularity but they will not be replacing the ultrabook or even the netbook so easily. No single method of messaging has ever come close to replacing email. No matter how FOSS it becomes, Windows is not going to displace Linux or BSD distros when it comes to servers. Bitnami is not going to stop people rolling their own web applications and solution stacks.

Slack has its use-cases. Collaborative chat for non-tech people who either do not want customisation, or cannot be trusted with it, to communicate rapidly from any device and easily integrate with popular filesharing/social media applications in private channels. Sounds great but it's bloody specific when you think about it.

In a way, if you were to slap Microsoft Office apps into it, Slack would be what Office365 should have been. And it may yet prove to be an Office365 killer. but it is not going to displace IRC. As another comment has said, IRC filters users by their ability to actually learn about it, rather like cryptocurrencies--they're not very complicated at entry level but there is an entry hurdle that precludes any old numpty from joining in. IRC has long been a haven for people who want to avoid at least a percentage of the web's numpties.

Slack won't even replace forums because fundamentally a Slack team has no identity, no creative control. I can't see SomethingAwful or Hacker News being replaced by Slack. It's not even just about style/design: HN's arc implementation, and basically any community's solution stack, is part of what makes it a separate entity. Slack is too impersonal, too clinical to make for much of a walled garden as many forums seem to be.

Come back when slack works over i2p, then I'll dump IRC.

Slack is pretty neat to communicate with less tech-minded people, it is very accessible. And it has an IRC adapter, 90% of my interaction with slack is in irssi, the rest is on mobile.