Old IRC veteran here, spent lots of time on #OSWD and loved it. Having said that, we have IRC at our hackerspace I a despise it because of I'm not connected all the time and miss out on important org business. For a few months we plugged matrix.org into the irc and it is a blessing.

Discord seems to be a more elegant solution than Slack tbh, and I happen to be on several developer servers. The web app/desktop app/mobile app all function brilliantly.

The issue I have with Discord is the lack of threads. When you're helping multiple people at once threads can help distinguish who you're talking to. Or when you have multiple conversations happening at once it stops things getting confusing.

wholeheartedly agree with this. The counter on the top an be annoying as it just aggregates all private chats.

Agree. One huge plus over Slack is that you don’t need a separate account for each community. And joining can be easily done via just clicking a link.

I feel like slack is better for work. But for almost everything else, I just want to check out a channel without the overhead of creating an account.

Could you suggest some ?

http://unrealslackers.org/ https://godotengine.org/community

Both game engine examples but super helpful developer communities none the less.

I'm not necessarily vouching for Slack here, but I routinely have 2 Slack tabs open in Chrome for 2 different communities.

The desktop app is unusably slow on my machine.

You have to ask yourself why someone would use Slack despite IRC instead of assuming they're ignorant.

Then you'll see that there's also the question of "why IRC when we can just use Slack?" If you can't think of any answers to that, then you're not really equipped to eval the trade-offs.

Hipsterism? I do not think of any other reason to use something that for all practical uses is the same as IRC but instead of relying on an open protocol that would allow for multiple clients and servers, it uses its own proprietary lock-in tech that forces people to use a slow resource draining client.

(ok, i can think of one: "funny" emoticons. But i file that under hipsterism and if you really wanted, some IRC clients allows emoticons, but others might frown on your use of :sadbatman: :-P)

That you can only think of something negative of people who use something says more about you. Inability to understand the decisions of others isn't going to serve you well in life.

None of the positives for IRC that you mention facilitate the reason people actually use chat platforms: having conversations and forming communities.

Do you think people use IRC because it has an open protocol or because they want to chat?

The next step for you is to ask yourself what features Slack might have that does facilitate chat and community-building. Since you can only think of "funny faces", it sounds like you should actually download it and try it first.

And you'll soon be on your way to seeing other people as rational individuals with an appetite for different trade-offs than you instead of a bunch of idiots that just don't see the light.

I didn't really mention positives for IRC, i mentioned negatives for Slack.

> Do you think people use IRC because it has an open protocol or because they want to chat?

Most of the people who use IRC or Slack or Discord or HipChat or Skype or any other similar tech, do it because they want to chat. However not all uses are the same - creating a new chat room and entering the chat room are both uses, but the former means that you are in a position to decide what the people who will perform the latter will need to do. The people who will enter the chat room will not really be in a position to make much of a choice beyond entering the room/community or not, so their reasoning behind that choice is irrelevant when it comes to the selection of the technology for the chat room.

The people who will create the chat room, however, are those who will make those choices for everyone that follows in that room/community and it is to those people that i am referring to with "I do not think of any other reason to use something that for all practical uses is the same as IRC" - because there is really no reason to not use IRC and minor features that Slack or HipChat or Discord to some extent (Discord provides audio chat which some communities might prefer, although TBH personally i highly dislike it and any "server" - lol - i've seen that uses audio channels has them almost always empty) are not worth the restrictions these services impose on the other members of the community you are trying to create.