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Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server?
by pnathan 11y ago
Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server?
- oldmanjay 11y agoIRC generally means more futzing around than Slack and Hipchat. It's just a normal value proposition, like not growing our own food or making our own clothes or building our own cars, even if those things are possible.
- askafriend 11y agoAs patio11 puts it: UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX See more: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931499680657409 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931499680657409 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931665275916288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931665275916288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931949645533184 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931949645533184 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932099742957568 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932099742957568 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932289002508288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932289002508288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932918672420865 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932918672420865
- dataker 11y agoUXUXUX... is also a feature of many open source alternatives.
- Killswitch 11y agoYou mean "Lets clone Slack's UI and say 'look we are just as good at UX as Slack!'"
- urda 11y agoThis is the part where you offer a few links to alternatives and demonstrate why said "open source alternative" meets that requirement. Otherwise, you have a noisy and unhelpful comment.
- pnathan 11y agoA well administered IRC channel has all of those, though typically you farm out to an image hoster for the pasting of images.
- Albright 11y agoWhich is kind of a frustrating answer, because Slack's UX sucks. Its desktop app is just a wrapped web page; the fonts and colors match nobody's operating system; the fffffffffffffffffriendly scroll bar; all the cutesy messages and iconography; "Reconnecting…"; etc, etc. Yes, I understand that it's still friendlier to use than IRC, but there's a middle ground between "easy to use" and "still looks and works like a proper, professional desktop application." In fact, HipChat is pretty close, even though it's just a wrapped web page too. It's kind of frustrating to see that all of these Slack alternatives are pretty much taking the same crappy UI cues from Slack. It's kind of like how, until the last few years or so, many common Unix/Linux desktops looked like Win95 rip-offs… You don't need to strive for familiarity if what people are familiar with sucks.
- brenschluss 11y agoNone of your comments about Slack's UX are actually about UX; they're about the UI.
- Albright 11y agoFair enough. How's this: If the UI of a desktop application does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system, a bad UX is almost a certainty, in my experience.
- tptacek 11y agoIf I want to share a diagram with Patrick on our internal Slack --- which we set up in under 10 minutes --- I select the diagram on my desktop and drag it into the window for the Slack channel. Everyone on that channel sees the diagram immediately. I do not give a shit what Slack's buttons look like. I can't do that with IRC. Even if we're all standardized on a modern OSX IRC client, we're still going to end up "sharing" URLs.
- Albright 11y agoAgain, you can use HipChat and get something closer to the best of both worlds; drag-and-drop file sharing with a standard (well… more standard-ish) OS X interface. It's great for you that look-and-feel isn't so important to you, but it is to a lot of people, and that includes myself. At any rate, on Slack, I once drag-and-dropped a text file with the output of a shell script that a colleague wanted to see. He started telling me how it was strange that the output seemed to cut off right in the middle of a line. lol, just kidding, Slack was just cutting it off like that, since Slack apparently can't show more than the first few K of a text file for some reason SO WHY IS IT SHOWING IT AT ALL ARGH
- rdtsc 11y agoWell not sure if there are enough repeated UX-es in there. If there would be, maybe 5 more, I'd be convinced, but so far not really.
- vox_mollis 11y ago...except irssi and WeeChat offer substantially better UX* * personal opinion, yes, but it seems quite obviously true.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoTrue. But that's my personal problem with Slack, and I guess that of many others too - Slack could be just as awesome as it is if it used IRC on the backend. Instead, it just fragments the already shredded realtime communications infrastructure. For me, this smells of a typical SV startup that tries to "disrupt" something by locking people in and then extracting value out of them before eventually getting acquihired and hanging them out to dry. As it is now, the success of Slack and HipChat is a danger to communication on the Internet.
- itistoday2 11y agoIRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients.
- pnathan 11y ago> The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. A well-tended IRC server has those via bots. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of > topic-focused channels wut? This is totally easy in IRC: /join #topic-channel makes the channel > private channels I'm tempted to say that a bot can provide that... but sure. > and high quality mobile and desktop clients. Not buying that, sorry, I've been happy with my mobile/desktop clients; they are relatively full-featured.
- ashark 11y agoDoes your mobile IRC client notify you (push message) when you're mentioned or receive a private message, but only when you're idle or offline on your desktop client?
- mugsie 11y agoyes. and it is consistently faster than slacks push notifications.
- darklajid 11y agoHonest question: Which client would that be? I'm looking for a solution myself.
- ashark 11y agoI looked in to it after that answer. Colloquy[1] was the top hit for my search, and yeah, it does it, but (of course) you've got to have a bouncer[2] running all the time and connected to any channels you want to monitor. Probably pretty nice once it's set up, assuming there's a way to run it on a cheap VM or Raspi or something rather than your workstation or laptop. Looks like their mobile client attempts to register its device ID with bouncers in a channel when it connects, so that's automatic. Not exactly a competitor with what Slack and similar are doing—not having to set up and manage this sort of thing to achieve those services' features is exactly why people pay them—but seems like a nice solution if you prefer IRC. [1] http://colloquy.info http://colloquy.info [2] http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dwb 11y agoWhere I work, before Slack, we had Campfire and only us developers bothered to sign up for it, get the client, etc. We switched to Slack and suddenly everyone was on it. UX matters so much. We don't have time to tend an IRC server and act as support for it. Slack lets the whole company sign up ultra-easily and get on board – there's simply no contest. I lament the passing of the age of new open protocols too, trust me, I really do. But IRC+ecosystem just isn't that good these days, and getting stuff done matters more.
- ownagefool 11y agoI'd argue there's little reason one of the chat clones couldn't be backed by an IRC server and give us a similar experience.
- steeef 11y agoSure, but getting there takes a lot of work, something that Slack already gives you out of the box.
- 1123581321 11y agoFor us, it's the difference between only developers using chat and the whole company using chat.
- mikeokner 11y agoSounds like a good reason to keep using IRC amirite?
- AaronBBrown 11y agoThe second part of your question is a big part of the answer...an IRC server needs to be well tended in order to support the features that people want. I run a Technical Operations (DevOps, SysEng, whatever you want to call it) team...the last thing I want them spending their time doing is futzing with IRC software when there is a solution that takes 5 minutes to set up and is ready to go. Businesses should focus on their core competencies. For me, the biggest problem was when my computer was turned off overnight, I had to go to some external source to read the transcript of the conversations that transpired rather than having it available immediately, in my application. DMs can also be sent when the user is offline, which is great for "hey, get back to me when you're back on." I was able to solve some of these issues by setting up my own Quassel or ZNC server, but these were hacks and the clients were no where near as refined as Slack or HipChat.
- michaelcampbell 11y agoAd hominems aside, personally I like the multi-line block code pastes, the inline markdown, and the ability to post images from the clipboard. I haven't frequented IRC much since the mid to late 90's so perhaps it has those features now.
- gregmac 11y agoSo surprising more people don't mention multi-line messages (whether code blocks or not). IRC doesn't have this because the protocol itself simply doesn't support it. The standard answer is "pastebin" but that raises the barrier to entry, so to speak. We use Hipchat at work but I assume Slack has feature parity here: If I want to paste a code block to discuss, I literally press paste (ctrl+v) and send (enter). The first few lines show up for everybody, with an "expand" button so they can see the whole thing. No one has to have a specific client, no one has to visit a separate website (including me). It. Just. Works. Same goes for images, by the way: I can post a URL ending in jpg/png/gif and it shows up for everybody, inline (and intelligently: resized, and animated gifs are hidden by default). I can also screenshot an image and paste it into chat, and it automatically converts to an uploaded file: take screenshot, press ctrl+v, enter, image is there.
- balls187 11y ago> Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server? 1. Nerds (like me) have to talk to non-nerds. 2. Nerds (unlike me, but not unlike my wife) aren't interested in complex solutions to simple problems. And frankly, who is the "tender" of the "well-tended" IRC server? I don't want to maintain it. My wife and I used slack as the primary means with which we communicate for "couple stuff." We've used it to: Plan our Wedding Ceremony. Plan our Wedding Party. Plan our Honeymoon. Plan for our first child. Plan our next house purchase. Manage our Finances. Plan Dates. Plan our Meals. Archive Recipes. There would be no way my wife (a nerd) and I (a different type of nerd) could do this on IRC.
- lfowles 11y agoInteresting, because my wife (non-tech, but still nerdy EE) and I communicate a lot via IRC! I've never used Slack, but my assumption is that it's ephemeral messaging at the core. Could you expand on how you archive recipes? I should probably expand that IRC for us is pretty stateful, since we both run our own irssi instances in screen on a VPS.
- allannienhuis 11y agoSlack's design is exactly the opposite of ephemeral. Everything you post, including documents, is indexed and searchable.
- lfowles 11y agoOk, that makes more sense. I had something like Skype in mind... in theory I have my entire Skype history, but going back more than 100 lines or so is cumbersome. I'd rather teach my wife how to grep logs than to deal with that.
- balls187 11y agoAh, we just have a channel called "recipes" which we post links to. Search works pretty well to find them. Admission: my wife is pregnant, so she really only wants me to make one thing. http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/corn-and-lobster-chowder-107469 http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/corn-and-lobste...
- nodamage 11y agoIt's amazing to me that people still don't understand the importance of user experience (and low friction setup processes). Do you remember having to hand write your Xorg.conf files to setup a Linux desktop back in the day? Wasn't that a colossal waste of time? Aren't you glad that's not a thing anymore? Sure, I could try to set up an IRC server and the relevant bots and scripts to attempt to emulate what Slack provides natively, and then look for mobile apps that will connect to IRC and send me push notifications on relevant activity, or I could just use Slack.
- briandear 11y agoExactly it. I don't have time to manage an IRC server. I don't have time to help people figure out IRC when they first join the team. I also don't want to waste time on something that adds zero value to the products we're building. I use Slack for the same reason I own a dishwasher. I could hand wash dishes and it might even be slightly better, but then I'm spending time washing dishes rather than using the time for higher value activities. This rubbish about people worrying about Slack having access to your internal communications is just that -- rubbish. It's paranoid nonsense. The last thing anyone at Slack wants to do is read through 80 million lines of emojis and notifications and some private conversation about adding a counter cache to the Products table.
- icebraining 11y agoSlack itself probably doesn't care. What about the company that aquires them? What about the companies that will buy that data from them? And obviously one doesn't actually "read" the conversations, we're not in the 80s anymore, we have software to identify the juicy bits.
- victorhooi 11y agoDo you encrypt your email? Do all of your recipients? Slack is sold as a replacement for email, in many cases - so I fail to see how it's any worse than sending unencrypted emails all over the interwebs. And this tin-foil hat conspiracy insanity about how you shouldn't use external services like Gmail, or Slack because "Oh noes, they have our data" is just that - insanity. Sure, if you're paranoid, you're free not to use those services. But let's be honest, most of aren't working at Lockheed Martin, or the NSA. Our personal lives are inane and boring, and the majority of our work discussions are probably, outside of the context of our work groups, inanely boring as well. Nobody cares (which is fine). On the list of things to worry about, from meteorite strikes to global warming, I'd put, my chat provider trawling through my personal chats fairly low on the list.