
Why did Slack win out over IRC? (2018) - d99kris
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xw5wvj/why-did-slack-win-out-over-irc-anyway
======
stereolambda
I 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 conversation, while the local
culture may not be welcoming or easy to get into.

That said, I've succeeded in gradually getting some of my friends onto
Riot/Matrix. To be clear, I did it without much technical/ideological
evangelizing or being obtuse, just on the basis of them wanting to talk to me
and in our social group. But Riot is also at least nice-looking,
multiplatform, has modern features etc. Things that are still annoying:

1\. Dealing with Riot/Matrix system/client confusion. Most people don't care
about such distinctions, I should probably just focus on talking about Riot.
(I understand that developers may choose to do different in their
communication)

2\. Entering into 1/1 conversations. I still don't know/remember how to
reliably do it with a new person, always did it by trial and error by trying
to invite in ways X and Y etc. It probably requires finding the opt-in into
email invitations in the configuration by each participant. I understand these
are some anti-stalking measures, but God is it annoying.

~~~
ryukafalz
> Dealing with Riot/Matrix system/client confusion. Most people don't care
> about such distinctions, I should probably just focus on talking about Riot.

The thing I haven’t figured out is... why would people find this hard to
understand for chat, but not for email? Everyone uses email, and everyone
knows they can send an email to whatever email address they want no matter who
their provider is.

~~~
stereolambda
I don't see it as a question of understanding as much as caring. It's not very
realistic to do a "here's technical details of the protocol we'll be using"
talk every time you invite someone.

~~~
ryukafalz
They probably don’t care that much in the case of email either. Would it be
better to explain it by analogy? “This is like email, you pick a provider and
you can talk to anyone from there.”

~~~
stereolambda
Okay, I can agree with your framing from the sibling:

> I’m not convinced that open/federated protocols are inherently more
> difficult for people in general to understand.

We may be disagreeing on the hierarchy of the goals. I think the priorities
here are:

1\. That the protocol is open and decentralized from the operator perspective
(which is ensured in the case of Matrix).

2\. That many people use it.

The #1 should be important for an opinionated minority pushing everyone else.
The good thing is, non-technical people usually don't have much brand loyalty
in these things. It's purely perceived convenience.

That the majority of people understand and care about #1 may or may not be
realistic. I see it as partially another cause. Today, we have much of de
facto centralization in email while the protocol is still decentralized. It
would be nice to push chat to a more or less similar state and work from
there. (I would also gladly see decentralization and inter-operation of many
things enforced by law, but this is even more pie in the sky.)

Still, certainly your analogy can be used in communicating with people. But
the main thing I'm trying to achieve is #2, getting them on board anyway.

~~~
ryukafalz
Yeah, I think we largely agree. I'm mostly aiming for #2, because I'm hoping
that if we can get enough people using something that's hard to centralize,
network effects will take care of #1.

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.)

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alexhutcheson
Slack 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 very, very few companies that are currently paying for
Slack would have considered IRC to be a reasonable alternative.

~~~
Spivak
Yep, the only place I ever say IRC in actual corporate environments was for
private chats for the sysadmins.

~~~
def8cefe
Mozilla used IRC until recently, but they're not really a traditional corp
environment.

------
enlyth
I consider one of the biggest deal-breakers being able to snip part of your
screen with a keyboard shortcut and Ctrl-V it into the client for everyone to
see it inline, seamlessly. You don't have to mess around with image uploaders
or open image links externally in your browser.

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.

~~~
TomMarius
I remember we used tools that saved the snip to a specified directory,
targeted it at Dropbox public folder, and then there was an app or maybe
config option that pushed url of any new file in the public directory to
clipboard. Was even better because you had the URL immediately, without
waiting for upload.

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alexandernst
Because whenever somebody asked for:

* 24/7 presence, the reply was "you can do that with a bouncer"

* backlog, the reply was "you can do that with a bouncer"

* full text search, the reply was "that's up to the client implementation"

* file sharing, the reply was "it's already possible with XDCC"

and so on and so forth.

Basically, it's not that Slack is great, it's because IRC as a whole just
refused to adapt to what users actually wanted/needed.

~~~
dijit
More like nobody bothered to make a decent product that could do all the nice
things slack is doing.

(although, that's not technically true since irccloud does all the things you
just mentioned)

~~~
josteink
> nobody bothered to make a decent product that could do all the nice things
> slack is doing.

Slack is a closed-source for-profit SaaS, ruled by a single benevolent
company.

IRC is an open protocol-specification with a multitude of clients, servers and
networks.

You couldn’t find better apples and oranges for comparison if you tried.

~~~
dijit
I agree completely.

But we're talking about reasons people ended up choosing slack over something
like IRC (or, really, any open protocol instant messaging specification).

The grand-parent comment raises good points, people want these things, being
connected and reachable while not being connected to the server with any
client and having a context later on. These are problems that can be solved
but nobody has put effort into making a sexy product to do it. (and monetising
that kind of product might be troublesome)

~~~
josteink
> nobody has put effort into making a sexy product

Again we are comparing a _product_ to a _protocol_.

I’m just pointing out that this is not a reasonable comparison.

There were multiple web-enabled IRC bouncers (closed products) which would be
easy to use for anyone, including non-techsavy people.

But evidently the majority of IRC-users were fine without that and preferred
the traditional client-server-protocol realm.

~~~
dijit
IRC is more than a protocol, it’s an ecosystem. You cannot simply talk about
IRC in complete isolation.

It’s akin to comparing SMTP with chrome.

You have to include the clients and surrounding infrastructure.

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mstudio
This article is comparing apples to oranges. IRC is a protocol, Slack is a
client/app that uses protocols (one of which used to be IRC). Many IRC
clients, although beloved by some users, are rough around the edges.

In my opinion, Slack has "won" over other clients because of UX: it's
extremely easy to sign-up, understand, and use productively. Plus, even large
orgs (ours included), can use the free version if they're OK with having chat
history disappear after a few days/weeks.

~~~
apple4ever
Slack made the process easy, and with emojis and slash commands, fun and
useful.

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.

~~~
Spivak
I am in no way saying that this isn't a barrier to entry (and if we're honest
I think that barrier is an intentional choice) but you're supposed run a
bouncer/logger and just connect your client to that.

It's always weird to me that IRC didn't evolve like email with something like
IMAP.

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jimmyvalmer
Because my mom can figure out Slack, but not IRC. Isn't the "mom test" obvious
to all by now?

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axegon_
I 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 is pretty much the same, integrations are
much more simplified(I use them a lot to say the least and from my point of
view, all the API's work as a charm) and at the end of the day, you are the
owner of your data. So it is a genuine question: What gives?

~~~
quicklime
In a lot of corporate environments, "self-hosted" is not an advantage if
you're the one trying to set up something new. In order to self-host, you have
to go through your corporate IT department to provision servers. This alone
can take 6 or 12 months, and you still have to find someone to maintain the
service.

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)

~~~
JoBrad
It took _forever_ to get a self-hosted Jabber-based chat client going at a
mid-sized corporation, about 10 years ago. Someone went “rogue” and set a
server up anyway. Our security staff began blocking ports, so it eventually
died anyway... in favor of Skype and Yammer. All because no one wanted to host
chat history and a server.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
Because at some point all corporate firewalls were configured to block all
incoming traffic except port 80. Then everything died out: News, Irc, and now
finally FTP.

------
floatingatoll
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.

~~~
1337shadow
It looks to me like anonymous harassers on IRC would not really be blocked by
email validation... As such, it's probably just a matter of time before public
Slack rooms become their target.

~~~
floatingatoll
The definition of 'public' is not equivalent for IRC and for Slack.

IRC anope-style email verification simply requires that you are able to
initiate a TCP connection to the IRC server. If you can do so, you can have a
verified account. This kind of "public" is vulnerable to harassment as you
describe.

Slack additionally requires an invitation by a workspace owner for all new
users who wish to join, excepting only domains where the owner permits users
to join without invitation using a special invite link. Anyone who invites
harassers will find themselves under Slack's microscope as well. Owners who
enable automatic invite approvals for e.g. @gmail.com or @throwaway.com that
result in harassment can expect to find themselves banned by Slack and their
Slack shutdown. While in theory this kind of "public" could be abused to some
degree, it does not permit the 'anonymous' abuse that IRC's kind of "public"
does.

If an IRC network was set up to require that existing users put their
reputation on the line for new users, and in cases of harassment both the new
and existing user were banned, then that would be a far more tenable system
than what we have today. There's nothing that _requires_ this to be unique to
Slack. It just happens that Slack is willing to turn users away if they don't
like it, and so as a result their network is baseline safer than virtually all
IRC networks — such as Freenode.

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dusted
It dind't, yet at least. Let's see which one is still working in 20 years :)

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gijoeyguerra
it was giphy. that's why.

~~~
ejflick
Also the ability to upload custom emojis.

~~~
JoBrad
This is actually a huge + for any extensible chat client. We send alerts from
various monitoring solutions and use emoji to quickly identify the environment
and app. Makes it very easy to understand exactly what is going on.

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grumple
Because all you have to do is go to the website, follow a link, log in, and
boom, easily accessible chat. Has nothing to do with the protocol.

~~~
flas9sd
I concur, a hosted thelounge client instance brought me back to IRC after a
decade of absence, giving me Log history and recoverable state. If the
expectation is to go on public record (vs. private p2p chat) only user
experience decides for group chat, not the underlying technology. Though IRC
can't replicate threads, that is the only nitpick. In high volume channels
replies to old questions are fine and the dynamic caused by seemingly disjoint
replies can be learned.

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Lapsa
cause of annoying gif meme posting. and the battle has just began

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vinni2
Wasn’t it because you can’t get notifications from IRC?

~~~
Tagbert
And I have those notifications turned off.

Regardless of that, Slack is a complete and easy to understand solution. IRC
is a collection of unknowns where each user ends up with a different
implementation and may not be satisfied with where they end up.

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RickJWagner
Because Slack allows you to paste memes, and thus get the tiny dopamine hit.

~~~
dajohnson89
irc doesn't allow memes?

