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> If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC. Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know

> If IRC were good enough to handle the needs of small software company communication, people would use IRC. Sitting here pretending everyone just doesn't know about a 20+ year old technology is comical. I'd just like to point out that this argument ("if <x> were so great, everyone would already use/do <x>") is just a slightly different form of the ancient appeal to popularity argument and is entirely fallacious.

spdustin 11y ago
Respectfully, I disagree. In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. I'm a smart guy, have managed (and continue to manage) many, many UNIX-based services, and have run several IRC daemons in my life. I still use Slack for internal use, and for our students. What makes Slack (and its ilk, though the title of the post makes a bias against Slack clear) so great is that it's simple, easy, full-featured and has a low barrier to entry to the non-HN crowd that is being asked, in many cases, to use it. I can promise you, out of experience and out of just plain statistics, that Slack and IRC have different audiences, and those audiences will not likely prefer the other. Also, I'd guess that IRC is actually the more popular choice. But the majority of the IRC using audience is too busy getting work done in IRC to comment on an HN post.
- mempko 11y ago
  > In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. Which is the horse and which is the cart? Slack is easy because it got resources to be easy. Those same resource could have invested time to make IRC just as easy. There is no inherent reason why IRC cannot be just as simple. The reason slack is popular is because it got pushed hard and lots of money went into making it easy and popular. There is nothing inherent about IRC that would have prevented it to be just as easy as slack if the same resources were put for that work.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    This is like saying Apple products are popular because Apple has a great marketing team, as opposed to because said products are genuinely easier to use (they "just work") than their alternatives.
    - petewailes 11y ago
      Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not...
    - njharman 11y ago
      But that is why Apple is so popular. They are a marketing monster! They sell a "lifestyle" and they do it extremely well. They tell you to "Think Different" (as long as it means buying an apple product). They tell you one button is easy and the best. They tell people what to think and (some) people think that.
      - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
        Yet they spend less on marketing then most major tech companies. One could just argue they spend their marketing budget well, but you have to wonder.
        kbenson 11y ago
        Less as a percentage of gross income, or less in total dollars?
        seanmcdirmid 11y ago
        Both. Apple is infamous for its anemic marketing budgets; e.g. http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/apples-advertising-budget-dwarfed-by-microsoft-and-samsung/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/apples-advertising-budget...
        TeMPOraL 11y ago
        They spend just maintenance level. Tech press and media does the marketing for them.
  - KirinDave 11y ago
    It seems very unfair to the thousands of people who have donated time, money, and services to IRC over its life span to dismiss it as not having gotten value.
    - mempko 11y ago
      You misunderstood. I am saying IRC would be as easy as slack if the slack team spent the time working on IRC. Their investors would never let them even if they wanted to.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      It is not an obscure fact that investing shitton of money in marketing will yield better adoption than investing the same money in the product. People "who have donated time, money, and services to IRC over its life span" generally focused on the technical side.
- tptacek 11y ago
  I don't think you're going to find evidence for the argument that IRC is more popular than Slack. IRC's user base is declining, Slack's is growing, and the numbers we have now suggest that Slack is already much more popular.
  - late2part 11y ago
    The military uses IRC.
    - akshatpradhan 11y ago
      Yes they do. Check out ##security on Freenode. I also do some security stuff in ##GRC
  - KirinDave 11y ago
    But back before the WWW saw non-trivial deployment, IRC was the #1 use of bandwidth on the internet! Something from the 90's must still be true today!
    - dfc 11y ago
      I was surprised when I read this comment. Do you have any evidence for this? If I had to pick some protocols off the top of my head I would have thought nntp, smtp, ftp, but certainly not irc.
      - gopalv 11y ago
        I assume that he'd be talking about the IRC DCC sub-protocol. CTCP and then SEND bots?
  - thegeekpirate 11y ago
    Slack has 1.1 million users _total_ (http://www.fastcompany.com/3047819/with-over-1-million-users-slack-now-aims-to-get-a-lot-more-useful http://www.fastcompany.com/3047819/with-over-1-million-users...), meanwhile Twitch uses IRC, and has ~3.3 million per day alone (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/29/twitchs-viewers-reach-100-million-a-month http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/29/twitchs-viewers-reach...), using stats taken eleven months ago while more than doubling its monthly viewer numbers every year. Freenode isn't the only network out there =)
- rhizome 11y ago
  I'm thinking a huge part of the difference between Slack and IRC audiences has to do with the $340MM Slack has raised. If someone gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, the differences might not be so obvious.
  - itengelhardt 11y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't companies usually get a quarter billion dollars AFTER they have shown traction?
    - rhizome 11y ago
      They got $17.5MM in the four years prior to even launching.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    If you gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, we'd have the world's most complex ncurses UI, and a security ACL system whose complexity would rival X509. And normal people would still use Slack, because Slack was able to make simple design decisions that benefit the overwhelming majority of users but piss off Unix nerds like us.
    - dijit 11y ago
      don't be naive, IRC was the simplest solution to a problem 25~ years ago, now systems have changed and things must be thrown away. that's just the nature of the beast, x.509 is also very old- but old things should be fixed or replaced with better alternatives, slack just fixes a usability problem.. but trades all privacy and freedom for that. Personally it's not enough, but google has a massive market share because normal people do not consider that their data or freedom has any worth. at least google is pro-free market in the way that you can extract data out later and migrate, I don't see slack being able to offer that reasonably. (or their incentive to allow it)
      - KirinDave 11y ago
- yo-code-sucks 11y ago
  Go suck a fucking dick Mr Smartie pants!
ocfx 11y ago
Yep! Unfortunately most debates or discussion are won with successive appeals to the people. People don't really seem to be that interested in informal logic as it applies to whatever discussion they are having. I think because it invalidates what they say in a way that isn't immediately intuitive so it feels fuzzier and easier to dismiss.
ftwynn 11y ago
That the reasoning is fallacious doesn't make the conclusion incorrect. I could argue that 1+1=2 because when I looked directly into the sun today both my eyes closed. The reasoning is wrong, but the conclusion is true. Similarly here, you could argue that the popularity argument is stronger because the tools are relatively easy to switch between and people are constantly re-evaluating this choice as new projects are created. Lock in and other switching costs bolster the concern of relying on popularity, but those don't come into play very strongly here.
KirinDave 11y ago
I didn't mean to imply it was causal. I implied that the industry is full of people who know about the product comparison and make exactly the opposite value judgement. Whatever gave you the impression I think this is causal?
lmm 11y ago
In a free market with well-informed participants, argument from popularity is entirely legitimate.
- quadrangle 11y ago
  only to a minor extent (in that what is most popular still does not necessarily correlate to what is actually best, only to what people favor). Also, network effects still happen in free markets. Anyway, it's all hypothetical. We don't have a free market with all participants being well-informed.
stephenitis 11y ago
It is a open market of tools out there... if IRC fulfilled the need and developed features that people really wanted they would be there. Why does gchat, snapchat, whatsapp, fb messenger exist if AIM had been fulfilling the need of the market?
- Estragon 11y ago
  > Why does gchat, snapchat, whatsapp, fb messenger exist if AIM had been fulfilling the need of the market? gchat & fb messenger are backed by huge companies trying to sew up the communications of a large community for the purposes of selling marketing services. The need they were created to fill is a corporate need, not a popular one. Whatsapp was primarily popular because it made it cheap to text on your phone. I don't know the history of snapchat, never used it.

spdustin 11y ago

Respectfully, I disagree. In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. I'm a smart guy, have managed (and continue to manage) many, many UNIX-based services, and have run several IRC daemons in my life. I still use Slack for internal use, and for our students. What makes Slack (and its ilk, though the title of the post makes a bias against Slack clear) so great is that it's simple, easy, full-featured and has a low barrier to entry to the non-HN crowd that is being asked, in many cases, to use it. I can promise you, out of experience and out of just plain statistics, that Slack and IRC have different audiences, and those audiences will not likely prefer the other. Also, I'd guess that IRC is actually the more popular choice. But the majority of the IRC using audience is too busy getting work done in IRC to comment on an HN post.

mempko 11y ago
> In many cases, things are popular because they are better/easier for a given audience. Which is the horse and which is the cart? Slack is easy because it got resources to be easy. Those same resource could have invested time to make IRC just as easy. There is no inherent reason why IRC cannot be just as simple. The reason slack is popular is because it got pushed hard and lots of money went into making it easy and popular. There is nothing inherent about IRC that would have prevented it to be just as easy as slack if the same resources were put for that work.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  This is like saying Apple products are popular because Apple has a great marketing team, as opposed to because said products are genuinely easier to use (they "just work") than their alternatives.
  - petewailes 11y ago
    Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not...
  - njharman 11y ago
    But that is why Apple is so popular. They are a marketing monster! They sell a "lifestyle" and they do it extremely well. They tell you to "Think Different" (as long as it means buying an apple product). They tell you one button is easy and the best. They tell people what to think and (some) people think that.
    - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
      Yet they spend less on marketing then most major tech companies. One could just argue they spend their marketing budget well, but you have to wonder.
      - kbenson 11y ago
        Less as a percentage of gross income, or less in total dollars?
        seanmcdirmid 11y ago
        Both. Apple is infamous for its anemic marketing budgets; e.g. http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/apples-advertising-budget-dwarfed-by-microsoft-and-samsung/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/apples-advertising-budget...
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        They spend just maintenance level. Tech press and media does the marketing for them.
- KirinDave 11y ago
  It seems very unfair to the thousands of people who have donated time, money, and services to IRC over its life span to dismiss it as not having gotten value.
  - mempko 11y ago
    You misunderstood. I am saying IRC would be as easy as slack if the slack team spent the time working on IRC. Their investors would never let them even if they wanted to.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    It is not an obscure fact that investing shitton of money in marketing will yield better adoption than investing the same money in the product. People "who have donated time, money, and services to IRC over its life span" generally focused on the technical side.
tptacek 11y ago
I don't think you're going to find evidence for the argument that IRC is more popular than Slack. IRC's user base is declining, Slack's is growing, and the numbers we have now suggest that Slack is already much more popular.
- late2part 11y ago
  The military uses IRC.
  - akshatpradhan 11y ago
    Yes they do. Check out ##security on Freenode. I also do some security stuff in ##GRC
- KirinDave 11y ago
  But back before the WWW saw non-trivial deployment, IRC was the #1 use of bandwidth on the internet! Something from the 90's must still be true today!
  - dfc 11y ago
    I was surprised when I read this comment. Do you have any evidence for this? If I had to pick some protocols off the top of my head I would have thought nntp, smtp, ftp, but certainly not irc.
    - gopalv 11y ago
      I assume that he'd be talking about the IRC DCC sub-protocol. CTCP and then SEND bots?
- thegeekpirate 11y ago
  Slack has 1.1 million users _total_ (http://www.fastcompany.com/3047819/with-over-1-million-users-slack-now-aims-to-get-a-lot-more-useful http://www.fastcompany.com/3047819/with-over-1-million-users...), meanwhile Twitch uses IRC, and has ~3.3 million per day alone (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/29/twitchs-viewers-reach-100-million-a-month http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/29/twitchs-viewers-reach...), using stats taken eleven months ago while more than doubling its monthly viewer numbers every year. Freenode isn't the only network out there =)
rhizome 11y ago
I'm thinking a huge part of the difference between Slack and IRC audiences has to do with the $340MM Slack has raised. If someone gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, the differences might not be so obvious.
- itengelhardt 11y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't companies usually get a quarter billion dollars AFTER they have shown traction?
  - rhizome 11y ago
    They got $17.5MM in the four years prior to even launching.
- tptacek 11y ago
  If you gave "IRC" a quarter of a billion dollars, we'd have the world's most complex ncurses UI, and a security ACL system whose complexity would rival X509. And normal people would still use Slack, because Slack was able to make simple design decisions that benefit the overwhelming majority of users but piss off Unix nerds like us.
  - dijit 11y ago
    don't be naive, IRC was the simplest solution to a problem 25~ years ago, now systems have changed and things must be thrown away. that's just the nature of the beast, x.509 is also very old- but old things should be fixed or replaced with better alternatives, slack just fixes a usability problem.. but trades all privacy and freedom for that. Personally it's not enough, but google has a massive market share because normal people do not consider that their data or freedom has any worth. at least google is pro-free market in the way that you can extract data out later and migrate, I don't see slack being able to offer that reasonably. (or their incentive to allow it)
    - KirinDave 11y ago
yo-code-sucks 11y ago
Go suck a fucking dick Mr Smartie pants!

ocfx 11y ago

Yep! Unfortunately most debates or discussion are won with successive appeals to the people. People don't really seem to be that interested in informal logic as it applies to whatever discussion they are having. I think because it invalidates what they say in a way that isn't immediately intuitive so it feels fuzzier and easier to dismiss.

ftwynn 11y ago

That the reasoning is fallacious doesn't make the conclusion incorrect. I could argue that 1+1=2 because when I looked directly into the sun today both my eyes closed. The reasoning is wrong, but the conclusion is true. Similarly here, you could argue that the popularity argument is stronger because the tools are relatively easy to switch between and people are constantly re-evaluating this choice as new projects are created. Lock in and other switching costs bolster the concern of relying on popularity, but those don't come into play very strongly here.

KirinDave 11y ago

I didn't mean to imply it was causal. I implied that the industry is full of people who know about the product comparison and make exactly the opposite value judgement. Whatever gave you the impression I think this is causal?

lmm 11y ago

In a free market with well-informed participants, argument from popularity is entirely legitimate.

quadrangle 11y ago
only to a minor extent (in that what is most popular still does not necessarily correlate to what is actually best, only to what people favor). Also, network effects still happen in free markets. Anyway, it's all hypothetical. We don't have a free market with all participants being well-informed.

stephenitis 11y ago

It is a open market of tools out there... if IRC fulfilled the need and developed features that people really wanted they would be there. Why does gchat, snapchat, whatsapp, fb messenger exist if AIM had been fulfilling the need of the market?

Estragon 11y ago
> Why does gchat, snapchat, whatsapp, fb messenger exist if AIM had been fulfilling the need of the market? gchat & fb messenger are backed by huge companies trying to sew up the communications of a large community for the purposes of selling marketing services. The need they were created to fill is a corporate need, not a popular one. Whatsapp was primarily popular because it made it cheap to text on your phone. I don't know the history of snapchat, never used it.