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We lost USENET to Reddit and Stack Overflow, and it feels like we're about to lose IRC to Slack. The Internet dies a little every time someone starts a new Sla

by alrs 10y ago

We lost USENET to Reddit and Stack Overflow, and it feels like we're about to lose IRC to Slack. The Internet dies a little every time someone starts a new Slack channel. I'm glad for the SPOF reminder. Can you imagine how many copy-pasted certs, passwords, and CC# would be hoovered up were Slack compromised?

api 10y ago
Don't blame the replacement. We lost USENET to spam and IRC to lack of innovation and poor UX. I stopped using both USENET and IRC long before any of these alternatives appeared.
- chrisfosterelli 10y ago
  This is a very good point. Many people I know stopped using IRC quite a bit before they ever started using Slack.
- Touche 10y ago
  The question I have is why aren't industry leaders contributing to these specs? Why isn't Slack sending RFCs to improve IRC?
  - aaronbrethorst 10y ago
    Why would they want to? Improving IRC does nothing to benefit Slack.
  - api 10y ago
    There is no economic model to support free/open systems and standards. It's in nobody's best interest.
    - Touche 10y ago
      Slack's business is built on free/open standards, they don't exist without http and html. Asking them to contribute in their area of expertise is not asking a lot.
      - ams6110 10y ago
        Not just that, none of the current web economy exists without linux and gnu and other free/libre software.
  - skywhopper 10y ago
    What benefit would it be to Slack to publish their protocols? Or to IRC to know about them? I think the chances are extremely slim that IRC could be improved by knowing how Slack works. Slack is not a technical marvel with mysterious underpinnings. It's a centralized chat service with a pretty interface, simple clients, and (the secret sauce that won them all the converts) seamless integrations with pretty much every other open or semi-open service out there.
    - Touche 10y ago
      IRC would benefit simply by having someone that's actually working to improve it. It doesn't matter if the improvements are superficial; humans are superficial, that stuff matter a lot.
- DanielStraight 10y ago
  Right. People are more than happy to use free, open source, standardized, distributed, self-owned software and services... when that software and those services offer the best solution for their needs. There's only so much ease of use and functionality people can be realistically expected to trade away. Yeah, Slack is down... but the gains made from using it outweigh the pain of having to deal with the failure. Improve the less proprietary options to where this isn't true anymore and people will stop using the more proprietary options. There are always trade-offs, and expecting people not to make them is unrealistic.
skywhopper 10y ago
It's sad, I agree. But IRC is such a pain for most people to deal with it's never going to reach a mass audience in its current form. Whereas Slack is dead-simple easy to use and no one has trouble understanding how to use it. If you want to save IRC, then we need to make it usable by everyone.
- silencio 10y ago
  Plus it's not like IRC itself isn't also a SPOF in a different way. I've had [private] servers go down, netsplits and connectivity issues on freenode effectively hindering communication... And all of the things that people use to make IRC more bearable are problems in their own right. Imagine a vulnerability with the znc bouncer? Tons and tons of people compromised right there. irccloud down? Oops. and so on.
- rocky1138 10y ago
  Can't we make it better? Can't we write an IRC protocol upgrade, server, and client that does the same thing that Slack beats IRC with? Namely, archived chats and in-chat images.
liveoneggs 10y ago
> were Slack compromised? ... again
draw_down 10y ago
I really wish people would stop pretending Slack is just IRC with a brand name slapped on. It's so much better to use in every single way. If you don't care about UX then you don't care about UX, but at least have the intellectual honesty to say it.
- popmystack 10y ago
  There is nothing about IRC which dictates what UX you have to use. Nothing was stopping the slack team with creating that client.
- spotman 10y ago
  I don't think the parent comment is talking about the UX really. But on the topic of UX and what are or are not losing, I will say that the UX of slack is not so good when it eats 2gb of memory all day and beachballs a modern day iMac quite badly if you have a channel with lots of fancy formatting. I have written to slack about this and they wrote a polite response back acknowledging the issue. Really hope they do solve this soon (Despite the connectivity issues) because it's become unusable for my team lately. Supposedly according to slack it is compounded when you have multiple teams. We have a team per client as we primarily do consulting, so now we have had to switch some teams over to another solution so that we can allow the teams that must be in slack to stay in slack. So, while I think slack has the potential to be much better in every single way, days like today illustrate that it's an SPOF, and on days when it is available, I would not call the experience reliably good, not as reliably good as modern day IRC is, unfortunately. (and I don't say this lightly, i love things like in-line code blocks, @ notifying people, mobile clients, and more)
- ams6110 10y ago
  I care about UX but I care about my desired UX. I'm not a slack user but assuming it were to be offered to me I'd want a command-line client. If it didn't have that capability I'd pass.
  - devhead 10y ago
    here you go: https://github.com/TidalLabs/Slacker https://github.com/TidalLabs/Slacker

by alrs 10y ago

api 10y ago

Don't blame the replacement. We lost USENET to spam and IRC to lack of innovation and poor UX. I stopped using both USENET and IRC long before any of these alternatives appeared.

chrisfosterelli 10y ago
This is a very good point. Many people I know stopped using IRC quite a bit before they ever started using Slack.
Touche 10y ago
The question I have is why aren't industry leaders contributing to these specs? Why isn't Slack sending RFCs to improve IRC?
- aaronbrethorst 10y ago
  Why would they want to? Improving IRC does nothing to benefit Slack.
- api 10y ago
  There is no economic model to support free/open systems and standards. It's in nobody's best interest.
  - Touche 10y ago
    Slack's business is built on free/open standards, they don't exist without http and html. Asking them to contribute in their area of expertise is not asking a lot.
    - ams6110 10y ago
      Not just that, none of the current web economy exists without linux and gnu and other free/libre software.
- skywhopper 10y ago
  What benefit would it be to Slack to publish their protocols? Or to IRC to know about them? I think the chances are extremely slim that IRC could be improved by knowing how Slack works. Slack is not a technical marvel with mysterious underpinnings. It's a centralized chat service with a pretty interface, simple clients, and (the secret sauce that won them all the converts) seamless integrations with pretty much every other open or semi-open service out there.
  - Touche 10y ago
    IRC would benefit simply by having someone that's actually working to improve it. It doesn't matter if the improvements are superficial; humans are superficial, that stuff matter a lot.
DanielStraight 10y ago
Right. People are more than happy to use free, open source, standardized, distributed, self-owned software and services... when that software and those services offer the best solution for their needs. There's only so much ease of use and functionality people can be realistically expected to trade away. Yeah, Slack is down... but the gains made from using it outweigh the pain of having to deal with the failure. Improve the less proprietary options to where this isn't true anymore and people will stop using the more proprietary options. There are always trade-offs, and expecting people not to make them is unrealistic.

skywhopper 10y ago

It's sad, I agree. But IRC is such a pain for most people to deal with it's never going to reach a mass audience in its current form. Whereas Slack is dead-simple easy to use and no one has trouble understanding how to use it. If you want to save IRC, then we need to make it usable by everyone.

silencio 10y ago
Plus it's not like IRC itself isn't also a SPOF in a different way. I've had [private] servers go down, netsplits and connectivity issues on freenode effectively hindering communication... And all of the things that people use to make IRC more bearable are problems in their own right. Imagine a vulnerability with the znc bouncer? Tons and tons of people compromised right there. irccloud down? Oops. and so on.
rocky1138 10y ago
Can't we make it better? Can't we write an IRC protocol upgrade, server, and client that does the same thing that Slack beats IRC with? Namely, archived chats and in-chat images.

liveoneggs 10y ago

> were Slack compromised? ... again

draw_down 10y ago

I really wish people would stop pretending Slack is just IRC with a brand name slapped on. It's so much better to use in every single way. If you don't care about UX then you don't care about UX, but at least have the intellectual honesty to say it.

popmystack 10y ago
There is nothing about IRC which dictates what UX you have to use. Nothing was stopping the slack team with creating that client.
spotman 10y ago
I don't think the parent comment is talking about the UX really. But on the topic of UX and what are or are not losing, I will say that the UX of slack is not so good when it eats 2gb of memory all day and beachballs a modern day iMac quite badly if you have a channel with lots of fancy formatting. I have written to slack about this and they wrote a polite response back acknowledging the issue. Really hope they do solve this soon (Despite the connectivity issues) because it's become unusable for my team lately. Supposedly according to slack it is compounded when you have multiple teams. We have a team per client as we primarily do consulting, so now we have had to switch some teams over to another solution so that we can allow the teams that must be in slack to stay in slack. So, while I think slack has the potential to be much better in every single way, days like today illustrate that it's an SPOF, and on days when it is available, I would not call the experience reliably good, not as reliably good as modern day IRC is, unfortunately. (and I don't say this lightly, i love things like in-line code blocks, @ notifying people, mobile clients, and more)
ams6110 10y ago
I care about UX but I care about my desired UX. I'm not a slack user but assuming it were to be offered to me I'd want a command-line client. If it didn't have that capability I'd pass.
- devhead 10y ago
  here you go: https://github.com/TidalLabs/Slacker https://github.com/TidalLabs/Slacker