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Slack is great. The valuation makes sense and I wish them continued success. All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company make us

Slack is great. The valuation makes sense and I wish them continued success. All the integrations, and workflows that Slack has enabled for our company make us more productive. I would hate to go back to what came before it. IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT.

netwanderer3 7y ago
Why are we comparing Slack to IRC, a product that came out in 1988?
- tirpen 7y ago
  Why shouldn't we compare them? IRC has probably 95% of the features slack has, is completely free and has been around since 1988. Seems like a logical comparison to make.
  - dijit 7y ago
    IRC doesn't have the virtue of having millions of dollars spent on clients for it. And we are comparing a service provider/client/protocol to something that is simply a protocol which is a bit apples to oranges. Assuming the same kind of provider exists in your company (IRC+BNC+searchable logging) and you standardised on something like weechat, then perhaps a comparison could be made. Slack Pros: - Voice/Video chat - slackbot "remind" notifications - Number of highly polished integrations - Rich integrations (button prompts etc) - Webhooks for bot integrations instead of needing to subscribe to RTM - User tags ("out of office" markers, "in meeting" markers) IRC Pros: - Your data doesn't have to leave your site - You can force connections to be on your intra-net - Simple, well understood protocol - Which is open, and not going away - More potential to integrate authentication with your normal authentication provider. - Rich moderation story - Flexibility of client, even if we take weechat as the standard it's still possible to run another. Is this fair? Maybe we should weight how much they're worth. But for sure if IRC had the investment slack had then it wouldn't be "trash", there's work to bring it into 2019 too[0] [0]: https://ircv3.net https://ircv3.net
  - WAHa_06x36 7y ago
    IRC is missing a LOT of the features that make Slack actually useable for its purpose. IRC just isn't a replacement for Slack in most situations, due to its lack of things people take absolutely for granted. One massive one being keeping history. Another is not being limited to text only, something people absolutely expect in this day and age.
- Kiro 7y ago
  It's the pro-IRC crowd's own fault for bringing up IRC as an argument against Slack. They're obviously shooting themselves in the foot though.
skribbj 7y ago
You have every right to think that Slack is amazing and that IRC is "complete trash" (although I completely disagree) - but please don't attribute it to UX. UX isn't just graphical design, it's also feeling responsive, fast, and accessible. Something that Slack, in my opinion, gets horribly wrong.
- welly 7y ago
  Curious as to what specifically you think Slack gets wrong? Honestly, I can't find fault with it. It's such a basic and uncomplicated piece of software, I'm not sure how they could get anything wrong.
  - skribbj 7y ago
    I just think it doesn't actually fit any purpose. For quick chats irc is faster and more accessible, and for long thoughtful discussions Slack is lacking a lot of features so that you might as well use email. A lot of discussion from this post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227115
    - welly 7y ago
      How is IRC in any way faster or more accessible than Slack for quick chats? Does IRC fit a purpose? If so, what? And how does it do anything better than Slack? Slack is certainly no email replacement, and nor will I ever use it for such but in my experience and for the purposes I use it for, it is far, far more featured than IRC, unless you're using some uber IRC client that I'm unaware of. I'm genuinely trying to understand out how anyone would think IRC is better than Slack and I speak as someone who used IRC from the early 90s up until only a few years ago when the communities I'm part of upped sticks and moved over to Slack.
      - triska 7y ago
        Personally, I cannot make a comparison between Slack and IRC because I have never tried the former. From the discussion, it is clear that Slack has many features and attractions that are not available or harder to obtain with IRC. However, for me personally, a major attraction of IRC is that I can easily use it from within Emacs, and automatically have the same Emacs key bindings available that I also use for navigating and editing files. With IRC, I can therefore quickly copy and paste text between chats and programs, search the history etc., all in the existing Emacs session, using the same key bindings, with direct access to built-in features such as autocompletion, dynamic abbreviation and spell checking, and — importantly! — without switching applications.
konspence 7y ago
Slack is one of the most bloated apps on my computer, and my smartphone. On both, it takes seconds to boot, and that's just to load the local cache. Syncing with the main server takes a few more seconds. It has some good UI patterns. But overall, it's heavy and slow. It takes longer to load than the previous chat clients I used.
- sethammons 7y ago
  On slower internet, slack takes ages. If I'm tethering, slack has taken over 30 seconds to load. Insane.
- duderific 7y ago
  It is a large and complex piece of software that enables great productivity gains if used correctly. I think a few second startup time is a small price to pay for that.
  - sethammons 7y ago
    I think the criticism is that it is hard to understand _why_ it is a large and complex piece of software. It seems like it should be small and relatively simple and load fast.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
beatgammit 7y ago
What's wrong with the UX of IRC? IRC is a protocol, not a specific client, and it supports a wide variety of server and client plugins. We had a really nice IRC going productively for a year or two, but we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text). The nice thing about IRC is that everyone can use whatever client they like and it will just work. I preferred command-line UX (irssi) because most of my job is based around the terminal, others prefer desktop clients, while others prefer web clients, and all were available for our IRC server. Our problem was that management wanted everyone on the same thing, and neither side (IRC vs Google chat) wanted to switch (they liked integration with web Gmail, we liked extensibility, and had already built useful plugins, like "run a build"). In the end, they didn't like our "less professional" plugins (Chuck Norris facts, gifs, etc), and we ended up compromising on Slack (we rebuilt some of our custom integrations). We went through a year or so of adjustment, and now we're reasonably productive with it. However, morale is a bit lower, and I think we're a bit less productive than before, but that's really hard to judge. Honestly, I just wish there was some nicer looking IRC client. I don't like trusting Slack and would prefer the tried and true protocol that we can tweak and just pay for a flashier client for those who like such things. However, it's better than the previous situation where teams just didn't communicate in text because they couldn't agree on a medium, which led to more interruptions than the annoying Slack notifications (non developers tend to always @ the tech lead instead of letting it be answered by whomever happens to be looking at the channel). I think it's wrong to blame IRC here. The UX of IRC is fine, it just doesn't have a flashy client (pidgin is really easy to use and available everywhere, but it's kind of ugly).
- golergka 7y ago
  Can you log on to IRC from your phone and then instantly search through all of your company's chat history through the last couple of years?
  - OrgNet 7y ago
    You can, if you log everything... and there are many websites that provide search engines for public channels... you could do the same for your private IRC server. If you don't mind having all of your data in the cloud, use slack.
kashyapc 7y ago
"Complete trash"? Please. I realize I'm feeling (objectively?) "defensive" as an everyday professional IRC user for the last 10-ish years. That said, having tried many of the recent obese chat tools (which do have some nice properties), I still maintain the stance that IRC's clutter-free nature brings a certain tranquility and clarity. Sure, IRC absolutely has its problems. However, as noted elsewhere[1], despite its flaws, IRC's strengths still shine with great luminence, when it comes to plain text-based communication. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119407 - - - <digression> It reminds of something I recently read in an essay called Coon Tree (written in 1956) by the inimitable E.B. White: "Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world is remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions." I didn't quote the surrounding context (which itself is quite enjoyable) for brevity. But do read the full essay if you can. </digression>
lostjohnny 7y ago
> IRC is complete trash We'll talk about it 10 years from now when Slack is gonna be "old cruft" while IRC still gonna be there rocking.
- rakoo 7y ago
  10 years from now IRC will finally allow you to upload images and documents in the discussion while the Slack competitor will have figured the perfect blending between instant chat, asynchronous long-form communication and concurrent editing for documenting the decisions that were taken. It's easy to keep a protocol alive when the protocol does almost nothing.
senorjazz 7y ago
> Slack is great. debatable. It is just a chat app after all. Don't get me wrong, it is alright, but I am not sure I would ever call a chatapp "great" > The valuation makes sense 16billion? To me it doesn't. It is just a chat app. People and businesses can move off it when the next chat app comes along with a new UI
ken 7y ago
> IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT. To me, that sounds exactly like someone defending AppleTalk, AOL, ICQ, or Minitel. Focus on usability, not interoperability. That's what people want, right? When it comes to communications, what matters even more than user experience, in the long run, is being compatible with everyone, even your competitors. There will always be customers who don't use your system, so lacking compatibility or federation will be a thorn in your side for as long as you exist. I've run out of fingers to count the incompatible proprietary chat systems I've seen die off. Even Google has killed off a few of their own, and Hangouts is next. Just being a young smart agile tech company does not make you immune. In 10 years, I bet people will be communicating over email, IRC, POTS/SMS, plus 4 or 5 new tech startups created by people who are in elementary school right now. Nobody's arguing that $(proprietary_system) doesn't make you more productive today (that's the point!), but they always have a sell-by date.
- askafriend 7y ago
  > That's what people want, right? Yes. That's exactly what they want.

netwanderer3 7y ago

Why are we comparing Slack to IRC, a product that came out in 1988?

tirpen 7y ago
Why shouldn't we compare them? IRC has probably 95% of the features slack has, is completely free and has been around since 1988. Seems like a logical comparison to make.
- dijit 7y ago
  IRC doesn't have the virtue of having millions of dollars spent on clients for it. And we are comparing a service provider/client/protocol to something that is simply a protocol which is a bit apples to oranges. Assuming the same kind of provider exists in your company (IRC+BNC+searchable logging) and you standardised on something like weechat, then perhaps a comparison could be made. Slack Pros: - Voice/Video chat - slackbot "remind" notifications - Number of highly polished integrations - Rich integrations (button prompts etc) - Webhooks for bot integrations instead of needing to subscribe to RTM - User tags ("out of office" markers, "in meeting" markers) IRC Pros: - Your data doesn't have to leave your site - You can force connections to be on your intra-net - Simple, well understood protocol - Which is open, and not going away - More potential to integrate authentication with your normal authentication provider. - Rich moderation story - Flexibility of client, even if we take weechat as the standard it's still possible to run another. Is this fair? Maybe we should weight how much they're worth. But for sure if IRC had the investment slack had then it wouldn't be "trash", there's work to bring it into 2019 too[0] [0]: https://ircv3.net https://ircv3.net
- WAHa_06x36 7y ago
  IRC is missing a LOT of the features that make Slack actually useable for its purpose. IRC just isn't a replacement for Slack in most situations, due to its lack of things people take absolutely for granted. One massive one being keeping history. Another is not being limited to text only, something people absolutely expect in this day and age.
Kiro 7y ago
It's the pro-IRC crowd's own fault for bringing up IRC as an argument against Slack. They're obviously shooting themselves in the foot though.

skribbj 7y ago

You have every right to think that Slack is amazing and that IRC is "complete trash" (although I completely disagree) - but please don't attribute it to UX. UX isn't just graphical design, it's also feeling responsive, fast, and accessible. Something that Slack, in my opinion, gets horribly wrong.

welly 7y ago
Curious as to what specifically you think Slack gets wrong? Honestly, I can't find fault with it. It's such a basic and uncomplicated piece of software, I'm not sure how they could get anything wrong.
- skribbj 7y ago
  I just think it doesn't actually fit any purpose. For quick chats irc is faster and more accessible, and for long thoughtful discussions Slack is lacking a lot of features so that you might as well use email. A lot of discussion from this post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227115
  - welly 7y ago
    How is IRC in any way faster or more accessible than Slack for quick chats? Does IRC fit a purpose? If so, what? And how does it do anything better than Slack? Slack is certainly no email replacement, and nor will I ever use it for such but in my experience and for the purposes I use it for, it is far, far more featured than IRC, unless you're using some uber IRC client that I'm unaware of. I'm genuinely trying to understand out how anyone would think IRC is better than Slack and I speak as someone who used IRC from the early 90s up until only a few years ago when the communities I'm part of upped sticks and moved over to Slack.
    - triska 7y ago
      Personally, I cannot make a comparison between Slack and IRC because I have never tried the former. From the discussion, it is clear that Slack has many features and attractions that are not available or harder to obtain with IRC. However, for me personally, a major attraction of IRC is that I can easily use it from within Emacs, and automatically have the same Emacs key bindings available that I also use for navigating and editing files. With IRC, I can therefore quickly copy and paste text between chats and programs, search the history etc., all in the existing Emacs session, using the same key bindings, with direct access to built-in features such as autocompletion, dynamic abbreviation and spell checking, and — importantly! — without switching applications.

konspence 7y ago

Slack is one of the most bloated apps on my computer, and my smartphone. On both, it takes seconds to boot, and that's just to load the local cache. Syncing with the main server takes a few more seconds. It has some good UI patterns. But overall, it's heavy and slow. It takes longer to load than the previous chat clients I used.

sethammons 7y ago
On slower internet, slack takes ages. If I'm tethering, slack has taken over 30 seconds to load. Insane.
duderific 7y ago
It is a large and complex piece of software that enables great productivity gains if used correctly. I think a few second startup time is a small price to pay for that.
- sethammons 7y ago
  I think the criticism is that it is hard to understand _why_ it is a large and complex piece of software. It seems like it should be small and relatively simple and load fast.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

beatgammit 7y ago

What's wrong with the UX of IRC? IRC is a protocol, not a specific client, and it supports a wide variety of server and client plugins. We had a really nice IRC going productively for a year or two, but we scrapped it because only our software developer used it and other people in the company preferred something else (they used a mix of email, Google chat/hangouts, and text). The nice thing about IRC is that everyone can use whatever client they like and it will just work. I preferred command-line UX (irssi) because most of my job is based around the terminal, others prefer desktop clients, while others prefer web clients, and all were available for our IRC server. Our problem was that management wanted everyone on the same thing, and neither side (IRC vs Google chat) wanted to switch (they liked integration with web Gmail, we liked extensibility, and had already built useful plugins, like "run a build"). In the end, they didn't like our "less professional" plugins (Chuck Norris facts, gifs, etc), and we ended up compromising on Slack (we rebuilt some of our custom integrations). We went through a year or so of adjustment, and now we're reasonably productive with it. However, morale is a bit lower, and I think we're a bit less productive than before, but that's really hard to judge. Honestly, I just wish there was some nicer looking IRC client. I don't like trusting Slack and would prefer the tried and true protocol that we can tweak and just pay for a flashier client for those who like such things. However, it's better than the previous situation where teams just didn't communicate in text because they couldn't agree on a medium, which led to more interruptions than the annoying Slack notifications (non developers tend to always @ the tech lead instead of letting it be answered by whomever happens to be looking at the channel). I think it's wrong to blame IRC here. The UX of IRC is fine, it just doesn't have a flashy client (pidgin is really easy to use and available everywhere, but it's kind of ugly).

golergka 7y ago
Can you log on to IRC from your phone and then instantly search through all of your company's chat history through the last couple of years?
- OrgNet 7y ago
  You can, if you log everything... and there are many websites that provide search engines for public channels... you could do the same for your private IRC server. If you don't mind having all of your data in the cloud, use slack.

kashyapc 7y ago

"Complete trash"? Please. I realize I'm feeling (objectively?) "defensive" as an everyday professional IRC user for the last 10-ish years. That said, having tried many of the recent obese chat tools (which do have some nice properties), I still maintain the stance that IRC's clutter-free nature brings a certain tranquility and clarity. Sure, IRC absolutely has its problems. However, as noted elsewhere[1], despite its flaws, IRC's strengths still shine with great luminence, when it comes to plain text-based communication. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20119407 - - - <digression> It reminds of something I recently read in an essay called Coon Tree (written in 1956) by the inimitable E.B. White: "Many of the commonest assumptions, it seems to me, are arbitrary ones: that the new is better than the old, the untried superior to the tried, the complex more advantageous than the simple, the fast quicker than the slow, the big greater than the small, and the world is remodeled by Man the Architect functionally sounder and more agreeable than the world as it was before he changed everything to suit his vogues and his conniptions." I didn't quote the surrounding context (which itself is quite enjoyable) for brevity. But do read the full essay if you can. </digression>

lostjohnny 7y ago

> IRC is complete trash We'll talk about it 10 years from now when Slack is gonna be "old cruft" while IRC still gonna be there rocking.

rakoo 7y ago
10 years from now IRC will finally allow you to upload images and documents in the discussion while the Slack competitor will have figured the perfect blending between instant chat, asynchronous long-form communication and concurrent editing for documenting the decisions that were taken. It's easy to keep a protocol alive when the protocol does almost nothing.

senorjazz 7y ago

> Slack is great. debatable. It is just a chat app after all. Don't get me wrong, it is alright, but I am not sure I would ever call a chatapp "great" > The valuation makes sense 16billion? To me it doesn't. It is just a chat app. People and businesses can move off it when the next chat app comes along with a new UI

ken 7y ago

> IRC is complete trash and I don't know why anyone would use it in the same sentence as Slack. UX matters. It matters A LOT. To me, that sounds exactly like someone defending AppleTalk, AOL, ICQ, or Minitel. Focus on usability, not interoperability. That's what people want, right? When it comes to communications, what matters even more than user experience, in the long run, is being compatible with everyone, even your competitors. There will always be customers who don't use your system, so lacking compatibility or federation will be a thorn in your side for as long as you exist. I've run out of fingers to count the incompatible proprietary chat systems I've seen die off. Even Google has killed off a few of their own, and Hangouts is next. Just being a young smart agile tech company does not make you immune. In 10 years, I bet people will be communicating over email, IRC, POTS/SMS, plus 4 or 5 new tech startups created by people who are in elementary school right now. Nobody's arguing that $(proprietary_system) doesn't make you more productive today (that's the point!), but they always have a sell-by date.

askafriend 7y ago
> That's what people want, right? Yes. That's exactly what they want.