It's useful to look at why the comments were wrong though. In the Dropbox case it was because the user forgot the size of the market of people that didn't use Linux on their desktop or wish to periodically upload folders using FTP clients encompassed most of the computer-using world. With crypto it looks much more like the evangelists who've erred on the side of discounting the level of inconvenience of their solution to non-niche adopters (including bits which are integral, like transactions being irreversible, secure private keys being the only way of retrieving one's funds or contracts being code)

Same with Slack/Discord vs. IRC. I think geeks tend to underestimate the power of polish, ease of use and integration of populist new social media features(auto expand/play gifs).

The flip side is handing over control over everything to Silicon Valley which is slowly coming to roost. Wonder what'll happen if the Discord store doesn't make enough money to pay for servers and investors demand RoI?

Really it is a matter of relative costs to everything. They already have the skillset to be thoroughly unimpressed. It would be like if someone tried to sell you a magnifying glass that would read words held under it out loud. You can already see fine and read it - why on earth would you want that? Well it would be a useful tool for the illiterate and blind.

The first assessment isn't wrong but limited in its scope to people like them. The blind and illiterate might 'overvalue' it as a priority. Getting the actual value is hard to tell prior to knowing the whole state of the market with a lot of work. It might become a best selling memetic "gag item" like the horse head mask or be useless even in the target market practically.

IRC is irrelevant in today's world. No serious, innovative community is still on IRC.

Every big open source project has a dedicated IRC channel on Freenode, still alive and kicking.

Slack is not an alternative.

> Every big open source project has a dedicated IRC channel on Freenode, still alive and kicking. > Slack is not an alternative.

A lot of large open-source projects have Slack communities, often alongside IRC ones. Take Clojure for example, with its 14k-members “Clojurians” Slack project.

Do Slack give free access to open source communities like that? Otherwise the price to have search of over 10k messages would be over £70k/mo which I'm guessing they're not paying. Slack's pricing model seems horrific for communities like that.

> Do Slack give free access to open source communities like that?

Yes. It’s free for non-profit orgs.

Not at all. Clojurians Slack does not keeps history for more than a few days because the community does not pay, and it's the major PITA. Slack does not offer any special treatment to large open source communities, other than tolerating their existence.

> Not at all. (…) Slack does not offer any special treatment to large open source communities, other than tolerating their existence.

I wasn’t clear. It’s free for non-profit orgs. Open-source communities that aren’t registered organizations are by definition not non-profit orgs.

IRC is niche these days but I'd be interested to hear your methodology to reach the conclusion that "No serious, innovative community is still on IRC".

I've heard Amazon uses IRC internally?

Amazon uses Chime (https://aws.amazon.com/chime/) internally.

Some teams on Amazon still stubbornly remain with IRC.

Source: worked on one such team at Amazon in 2017.