Slack has been excellent at introducing irc inspired, and irc borrowed concepts of bots, channels, aliases to the masses.
Oddly slack had a pretty painful sign up in the beginning to keep people on different subdomains.
I'm not sure if today's modern standards are going to look much better looking back in 5 years.
Maybe the measure of old techs is how much they still dominate from what is transferable and endures, like the concept of IRC->Slack, email->messaging, and forums to social media.
There is a fair question to ask how many new things are novel, vs rebooted or reincarnated. Bittorrent maybe, blockchain for sure.
Neither thanks. I ride a bicycle with an internal gear hub (IGHs, which are a technology that are over a century old,and put modern derailers to shame). I sometimes also walk.
Newer and more horsepower is not always better.
IRC being awful doesn't automatically make current alternatives not awful. I use IRC within my expectations, just as I do with other services.
Just because I expect a certain demographic in IRC doesn't mean I exclude myself from interacting with other ones too.
Without engaging the parent comment directly, the IRC user demographic is no longer average but that's okay. Average is also okay - there's room in this world for both.
Facebook and Twitter though, are trash as far as time sinks go.
Newer is not necessarily better.
"this service is only usable on your phone if you also sign up for another service" pretty much makes it a non-starter.
IRC has had literal decades to be improved and only now do people get serious about it after Slack and friends sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
Older isn’t necessarily better either. IRC has stagnated hard, about the only thing it has on the competitors is that it’s free.
And doesn't require 8 GB of RAM to run a client.
It's more than 'free'. It's an open standard. You can write a slack client in your favorite language and it will continue to work for years.
Slack does not compete with that.
Do you take a horse and cart to work or are you an average person who drives a car or catches the train?
Do you mill your own bread, or are you an average person who eats machine milled and produced bread?
Do you pump and sanitize your own water, or are you an average person who turns on the tap?
Calling people "average" for not using outdated and poorly designed applications that were written by 1 or 2 people in their spare time, versus applications and services designed by tens-to-hundreds of people, with the input of designers, UI and UX engineers, etc is moronic.
IRC, FTP, SMTP, Token Ring, etc are as good as they could have been at the time, but they are awful by modern standards. We should learn from them and design better successors.