
Slack Is Quietly, Unintentionally Killing IRC - crdr88
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/24/slack-is-quietly-unintentionally-killing-irc/
======
Mithaldu
As 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.

~~~
owenwil
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.

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vacri
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.

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tie_
_What_ is killing IRC?

Oh, OK, never heard of you. Get in the line behind ICQ, MSN Messenger, AIM,
Gtalk, Lync, Facebook/What's App and of course Skype. Get your HipChat bro
with you.

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hobarrera
I 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.

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EdiX
> 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.

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Devthrowaway80
Is 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.

~~~
BrainInAJar
our dev group moved to Slack and chat increased noticeably (plenty of our devs
would either ignore IRC and not connect to it, or connect to it and forget
about it)

it's not just non-technical people that care about polish.

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daviross
As 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/](http://matrix.org/) ),
because that's an open protocol.

~~~
Aeyrix
It's a shame there wasn't widespread support for XMPP's XEP-0045
([http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html](http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html)).
It was the closest thing to IRC that I believe could've made it the new
communication powerhouse in its place with its adoption by Google and
Facebook, among others. IRC is great but there's no denying it's dying. It's
shed to 60% of its userbase since 2003. It's not gaining new users.

Matrix ([http://matrix.org/](http://matrix.org/)) looks pretty good, but I
feel that it's trying to fill a niche that isn't there. A simple, open (in
terms of channels / rooms), chat protocol that doesn't have a complex barrier
to entry would work wonders.

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kolev
I 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...

[0] [https://gitter.im/](https://gitter.im/)

[1] [https://kato.im/](https://kato.im/)

------
wanda
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.

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filmgirlcw
To 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.

~~~
vacri
_I wish I could somehow fuse the two together for one interface._

Both Hipchat and Slack support the Jabber protocol, so you could potentially
work out something there.

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cyberjunkie
The process of joining IRC (which comes naturally to us today), is actually
really complicated for the non-techie. This is a good thing, because we value
IRC for like-minded folk. It feels like we're part of a cult. I don't think
many of us want the masses to come to IRC. IRC is a filter, so keep the
Facebook/WhatsApp/Snapchat/etc. away.

Oh, and if Slack is making IRC redundant, KiwIRC, Mibbit, IRCloud and the rest
are making it easily accessible.

 _grabs pitchfork_

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dataker
I 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.

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ddebernardy
No 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.

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

