3 ms·

I think it's that it never gained a groundswell in the US. In Europe, and I can think of sweden and norway in particular, there were all sorts of completely te

• tyfon 11y ago
  I remember using IRC in the early 90s here in Norway, there was basically a channel for every municipal, school, social group etc. Even my mother used it. That anyone find it hard to use is flabbergasting to me as it is a matter of opening a client, entering a nick and selecting server. With the web IRC clients it's even easier I guess. I still hang out in several of the channels from my early days :)
• jarek 11y ago
  Yeah, nothing about IRC is intrinsically difficult. There's some things that are much easier on Slack, like archive search, but how many people actually use that? If you tell people something is hard to use, they'll believe you. If you tell them how to use something, they'll use it...
  • cillian64 11y ago
    The really big thing for me is persistence. If you want your client to stay online when you are not, things get very painful. Bouncers are a pain to setup, command-line IRC clients are awful, and I've seen countless people horribly confused by screen and tmux. With slack, persistence comes for free. The only thing I've seen that comes close is irccloud, which is in my opinion an excellent competitor to slack. In the end my organisation went with slack because it's nice to have everything grouped and billed to the organisation, as well as being even simpler for end users to join.
    • tw04 11y ago
      Bouncers are a pain to setup? You can literally order pre-setup bouncers with web interfaces... it really doesn't get much easier.