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Does slack feel like IRC to anybody else? Sorry I didn't mean for this to be divisive or rude. I wasn't aware this was a common observation. I'm not trying to

Does slack feel like IRC to anybody else? Sorry I didn't mean for this to be divisive or rude. I wasn't aware this was a common observation. I'm not trying to be negative or incriminate the product. I use and enjoy slack every day.

FooBarWidget 10y ago
Not sure what you want to say with that statement. Slack has a ton more features than IRC, so until IRC catches up and is easy to maintain I couldn't care less what Slack is written in.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Navarr 10y ago
That's mostly what Slack is and why people like it. IRC was (and still IS) good. Slack is basically a modern way to view and utilize the same basic system. It also made it very easy for developers to integrate components (whereas IRC you'd have to search out some way to do such integrations) - and with the "special" UX that they control they could add things like button actions on messages. A client like Slack for IRC with some of the newer IRC RFCs could potentially work just as well - as long as the UX and push notifications etc were nailed.
- kristopolous 10y ago
  IRC is a pain, yes. I made a C library to talk to IRC servers about (oh god) 15 years ago that I then put a perl wrapper around ... it provided a notification engine like the slack notifications I see today. But I had to cull all the hacker in me from 15 years ago to get it working right ... not an easy thing at all.
DoodleBuggy 10y ago
That's pretty much exactly what it is, to me anyway. It's IRC for non-technical people (not that IRC is particularly technical, but...)
- lotyrin 10y ago
  IRC, minus a bunch of technical nonsense nobody who is busy will bother to understand or manage (mode flags, server vs network channels, out-of-band post-hoc client-to-client features, netsplits), with good stories for multi-device (single, consistent cross platform experience) and offline (messages are queued/marked as read server side, in a way consistent across devices) and bots (anyone can add an integration in a few minutes, instead of delegating to a developer to add some code to the latest pet bot which soaks up maintenance effort like a sponge) management (managed, easy access control, no services bolted on as an afterthought) and file sharing (files stored server side, every client and user supports the feature, file can be sent when user's client is offline, doesn't have to figure out how to forward some ports or something) presence (consistent single feature instead of someone maybe implementing away status or an away nickname) identity (nicks === users) and so, so much more.
  - kristopolous 10y ago
    It sounds like you've extensively tried to work with both, correct?
    - lotyrin 10y ago
      Indeed. I'm the seemingly rare creature who was able and willing to jump through all the IRC hoops but can still understand the people who maybe can't but certainly won't.
      - trome 10y ago
        I dunno, I get people on IRC all the time using web clients, there aren't many hoops to jump through to get on it. You don't even have to register either.
        lotyrin 10y ago
        Yeah, sure if you just want to send and receive text synchronously from a public channel, each feature past that point and you have to break open your computing history book and learn some arcane incantations.
schmichael 10y ago
This is an odd question to ask when the feature being announced, video call integration, is definitely not available in IRC. Slack is "just IRC" as much as vim is "just ed."
- kristopolous 10y ago
  Certainly! I was just wondering if anyone had that similarity feeling that I did. Didn't mean anything more than just an innocent curiosity.
jamestenglish 10y ago
Wow quick to the low effort Slack is just IRC comment. In my opinion Slack does something that is often very undervalues and easily overlooked, it is like the opposite of a death my a thousand cuts - superiority by a thousand minor improvements. When taken individually or even in handfuls none of the features are that impressive, but cumulatively it creates a much better product. This was very apparent to me at least when I switched from HipChat to Slack. Just reading features or looking at screenshots they are nearly identical, yet with actual use Slack seems like a significant step up. So yes IRC is to Slack, as the Ford Model T is to a Mercedes S-Class.
- kristopolous 10y ago
  The one thing that I liked (and still like) about IRC is its federated server model. Maybe I need to do more research, but I guess I am assuming that slack is a for-profit company with private servers that they own somewhere that everyone uses ... or am I totally off?
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    If you're looking for "a better IRC" while still not tying your communications to a single data silo, Matrix[0] with the Riot[1] client is currently the best experience. The brilliant bit is that you can set up your own homeserver which holds all your chat logs, can authenticate against whatever you like (internal username/password, LDAP, or even CAS single sign-on), and allows you to communicate with people and rooms on other homeservers without having to manually connect, create a dozen different accounts, etc. I think right now, 50% of users are on the matrix.org homeserver and 50% are on their own homeservers. And the upside of everyone being on a homeserver is that everyone essentially has their own bouncer by default - no more having to set up ZNC on some random VPS on a user-by-user basis, you can always message anyone and they'll get your message whenever they reconnect. Because of its federated model, you can also use it to communicate with other companies and customers as well as internal communications - something Slack/etc aren't really chasing after. [0] https://matrix.org https://matrix.org [1] https://riot.im https://riot.im
erlehmann_ 10y ago
I personally think that Slack has been heavily inspired by IRC and it can be seen by its feature set and failure modes – where it more resembles IRC than any other messaging solution I am aware of that came after it (importantly, Slack engineers did apparently not learn from XMPP). One example deficiency is message ordering. In Slack, messages ordering sometimes changes sometimes after I have received two messages, that are then ordered differently. Is this an example of “eventual consistency” in the wild? Another deficiency of Slack that definitely is more “inspired” by IRC than anything else is the reconnection handling. If you ever have used IRC, Slack and XMPP on a train (or any other spotty connection), you may have noticed that IRC (or Slack) can time out without you noticing immediately, while with XMPP temporary network problems are usually handled automatically by modern clients. The difference in both cases lies in stream management – if each message has a sequence number (as it has in XMPP with XEP-0198), endpoints can definitely establish a) an ordering and b) what the last message received was. This eliminates any manual replay. Slack does not do this, apparently, even though unexpected network termination happens frequently. A third defiency of Slack that makes it look like IRC is the notable absense of metadata fields. While in XMPP you can have a vCard, the Slack documentation contains this gem, indicating Slack developers themselves abuse the last name field to convey information such as not being in the office: > We ask that everyone displays first and last names in Slack, so we can use the last name field to alert coworkers when they are out of the office, on extended leave, or sick for the day. Source: https://slackhq.com/slack-101-onboarding-247454704155#11aa https://slackhq.com/slack-101-onboarding-247454704155#11aa
LukasRos 10y ago
As the infamous Jenn Schiffer said, "IRC is like Slack for old people" :)

FooBarWidget 10y ago

Not sure what you want to say with that statement. Slack has a ton more features than IRC, so until IRC catches up and is easy to maintain I couldn't care less what Slack is written in.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Navarr 10y ago

That's mostly what Slack is and why people like it. IRC was (and still IS) good. Slack is basically a modern way to view and utilize the same basic system. It also made it very easy for developers to integrate components (whereas IRC you'd have to search out some way to do such integrations) - and with the "special" UX that they control they could add things like button actions on messages. A client like Slack for IRC with some of the newer IRC RFCs could potentially work just as well - as long as the UX and push notifications etc were nailed.

kristopolous 10y ago
IRC is a pain, yes. I made a C library to talk to IRC servers about (oh god) 15 years ago that I then put a perl wrapper around ... it provided a notification engine like the slack notifications I see today. But I had to cull all the hacker in me from 15 years ago to get it working right ... not an easy thing at all.

DoodleBuggy 10y ago

That's pretty much exactly what it is, to me anyway. It's IRC for non-technical people (not that IRC is particularly technical, but...)

lotyrin 10y ago
IRC, minus a bunch of technical nonsense nobody who is busy will bother to understand or manage (mode flags, server vs network channels, out-of-band post-hoc client-to-client features, netsplits), with good stories for multi-device (single, consistent cross platform experience) and offline (messages are queued/marked as read server side, in a way consistent across devices) and bots (anyone can add an integration in a few minutes, instead of delegating to a developer to add some code to the latest pet bot which soaks up maintenance effort like a sponge) management (managed, easy access control, no services bolted on as an afterthought) and file sharing (files stored server side, every client and user supports the feature, file can be sent when user's client is offline, doesn't have to figure out how to forward some ports or something) presence (consistent single feature instead of someone maybe implementing away status or an away nickname) identity (nicks === users) and so, so much more.
- kristopolous 10y ago
  It sounds like you've extensively tried to work with both, correct?
  - lotyrin 10y ago
    Indeed. I'm the seemingly rare creature who was able and willing to jump through all the IRC hoops but can still understand the people who maybe can't but certainly won't.
    - trome 10y ago
      I dunno, I get people on IRC all the time using web clients, there aren't many hoops to jump through to get on it. You don't even have to register either.
      - lotyrin 10y ago
        Yeah, sure if you just want to send and receive text synchronously from a public channel, each feature past that point and you have to break open your computing history book and learn some arcane incantations.

schmichael 10y ago

This is an odd question to ask when the feature being announced, video call integration, is definitely not available in IRC. Slack is "just IRC" as much as vim is "just ed."

kristopolous 10y ago
Certainly! I was just wondering if anyone had that similarity feeling that I did. Didn't mean anything more than just an innocent curiosity.

jamestenglish 10y ago

Wow quick to the low effort Slack is just IRC comment. In my opinion Slack does something that is often very undervalues and easily overlooked, it is like the opposite of a death my a thousand cuts - superiority by a thousand minor improvements. When taken individually or even in handfuls none of the features are that impressive, but cumulatively it creates a much better product. This was very apparent to me at least when I switched from HipChat to Slack. Just reading features or looking at screenshots they are nearly identical, yet with actual use Slack seems like a significant step up. So yes IRC is to Slack, as the Ford Model T is to a Mercedes S-Class.

kristopolous 10y ago
The one thing that I liked (and still like) about IRC is its federated server model. Maybe I need to do more research, but I guess I am assuming that slack is a for-profit company with private servers that they own somewhere that everyone uses ... or am I totally off?
- vertex-four 10y ago
  If you're looking for "a better IRC" while still not tying your communications to a single data silo, Matrix[0] with the Riot[1] client is currently the best experience. The brilliant bit is that you can set up your own homeserver which holds all your chat logs, can authenticate against whatever you like (internal username/password, LDAP, or even CAS single sign-on), and allows you to communicate with people and rooms on other homeservers without having to manually connect, create a dozen different accounts, etc. I think right now, 50% of users are on the matrix.org homeserver and 50% are on their own homeservers. And the upside of everyone being on a homeserver is that everyone essentially has their own bouncer by default - no more having to set up ZNC on some random VPS on a user-by-user basis, you can always message anyone and they'll get your message whenever they reconnect. Because of its federated model, you can also use it to communicate with other companies and customers as well as internal communications - something Slack/etc aren't really chasing after. [0] https://matrix.org https://matrix.org [1] https://riot.im https://riot.im

erlehmann_ 10y ago

I personally think that Slack has been heavily inspired by IRC and it can be seen by its feature set and failure modes – where it more resembles IRC than any other messaging solution I am aware of that came after it (importantly, Slack engineers did apparently not learn from XMPP). One example deficiency is message ordering. In Slack, messages ordering sometimes changes sometimes after I have received two messages, that are then ordered differently. Is this an example of “eventual consistency” in the wild? Another deficiency of Slack that definitely is more “inspired” by IRC than anything else is the reconnection handling. If you ever have used IRC, Slack and XMPP on a train (or any other spotty connection), you may have noticed that IRC (or Slack) can time out without you noticing immediately, while with XMPP temporary network problems are usually handled automatically by modern clients. The difference in both cases lies in stream management – if each message has a sequence number (as it has in XMPP with XEP-0198), endpoints can definitely establish a) an ordering and b) what the last message received was. This eliminates any manual replay. Slack does not do this, apparently, even though unexpected network termination happens frequently. A third defiency of Slack that makes it look like IRC is the notable absense of metadata fields. While in XMPP you can have a vCard, the Slack documentation contains this gem, indicating Slack developers themselves abuse the last name field to convey information such as not being in the office: > We ask that everyone displays first and last names in Slack, so we can use the last name field to alert coworkers when they are out of the office, on extended leave, or sick for the day. Source: https://slackhq.com/slack-101-onboarding-247454704155#11aa https://slackhq.com/slack-101-onboarding-247454704155#11aa

LukasRos 10y ago

As the infamous Jenn Schiffer said, "IRC is like Slack for old people" :)