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A comment on Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada. Parent comment

Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by ryandrake on Thursday December 20, 2018 @10:21AM (#18725610)
Not necessarily disagreeing but could someone provide some solid examples of IRC being a terrible user experience? Whenever IRC comes up, people say it lost and it’s not the right technology. When pressed, they wave their hands around saying “...because, uh, user experience reasons!” As a longtime user of IRC, I’m probably blind to these issues. What’s so bad about it that causes people to put up with these inadequate “cloud” re-implementations?
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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by jamiek88 on Thursday December 20, 2018 @10:28AM (#18725672)
setting up, just getting started with IRC for a non-tech person is basically way too hard bordering on impossible from their perspective.

We can talk about all the other issues around persistence and UX but just getting started is something beyond the vast majority of computer users.

It’s really hard for us to remember and empathize with this.

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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by weberc2 on Thursday December 20, 2018 @10:34AM (#18725732)
I’m a tech person and I struggle. It’s a chat app; shouldn’t be so complex.
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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by pera on Thursday December 20, 2018 @11:45AM (#18726447)
Too hard? I installed mIRC on my own at age ~12 in the late 90s and I don't remember having any issues, the only thing you had to do was to type a nickname and choose a server. Nowadays it's even more simpler since you don't even need to install a client (qwebirc, kiwiirc, etc.).
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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by wpietri on Thursday December 20, 2018 @06:02PM (#18730034)
Sure. 12-year-olds who go on to be software developers can install it. That says nothing about the user experience of the bottom quartile of users in terms of technical aptitude.
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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by def_true_false on Thursday December 20, 2018 @01:15PM (#18727435)
I'm not sure why people keep saying this. If all you want is a web client, it doesn't get much easier than qwebirc: https://webchat.freenode.net/
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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by rhizome on Thursday December 20, 2018 @08:05PM (#18730696)
I'd agree that it's possible there are some discoverability issues, but i don't see where '/server irc.(efnet|freenode|etc.)' is bordering on impossible.
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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by ciupicri on Thursday December 20, 2018 @11:37AM (#18726353)
But developers are not non-tech persons, they're techies.
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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by paulddraper on Thursday December 20, 2018 @10:25AM (#18725644)
Access to history and search

Google SSO/SAML

Threads

But mostly access to history and search. (Note that it's not coincidence that this is what differentiates the free from paid Slack.)

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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by munk-a on Thursday December 20, 2018 @01:38PM (#18727678)
Threads have been super useful for us, we have a few channels that are forums by social agreement where long running discussions are recorded to make it easy to reference. We found this style to be easier to review then breaking off separate channels per topic and we generally use it for initial feature exploration. Once something moves into the category of "We're doing this" we split off a channel and isolate the discussion.
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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by gog on Friday December 21, 2018 @05:21AM (#18732469)
You need a bouncer if you need access to history, that is a deal breaker for most people. Also, being able to ping somebody via a push message on their mobile is also a nice thing when working in a remote team. Apps on mobile are also not that nice.

That being said, I wish there was a better open source alternative.

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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by doublepg23 on Thursday December 20, 2018 @01:31PM (#18727619)
As a tech guy, history is the biggest complaint. riot.im is great in this respect because I get IRC (with history!) and a great UI.
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